Jillian's Gold -- an excerpt from my 3rd novel

8/9/2019 Jillian's Gold -- an excerpt from my 3rd novel

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Jillian’s Gold

a novel by

Levi Montgomery



(c) 2009 Levi Montgomery All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. It is entirely a product of my own murky imagination, and any resemblance to any

person, place or event is purely coincidental.

Please visit my website at

www.levimontgomery.com

ISBN 978-1448635535



Also by Levi Montgomery:

Other Loves – Four Novellas

Cursing the Cougar

Stubbs and Bernadette

A Place to Die

Light Always Changes





Jillian’s Gold

A novel by Levi Montgomery





Jan 2, 2009

Dear Auntie May,How odd to be writing you a letter. How odd to be writing

anyone a letter. If I were to decide to write a “letter” to anyone else Iknow, it would be a quick note at school, or an email. And I mustadmit, I first sat down at my computer to write this. I can’t

promise they will all be handwritten, but it did seem to me that atleast this first one must be.

We arrived at our new house two days ago, and what a beautifullittle house it is! It’s one of those places you drive past in a strange

town, on your way to somewhere else, somewhere that matters, andyou see it out of just the very corner of your mind. You driveaway, not stopping, not slowing, just thinking to yourself “Whata great little place that is! I’d love to live there! I would have a greycat called Absolute, and a terrier-spaniel mix called Ruffian, andbig bird-feeders hanging in the elm trees out front. It will be darkand cool inside, the yeasty aroma of my fresh-baked breadseeking every tiny nook and cranny of the house, and I shall wear an apron, crisp white cotton with floury hand-prints.”

And then it’s gone. You never see it again, and in an hour or so,you can’t even feel it anymore, just the memory of having felt it.

All you have left is the sight of it, tucked away in your mind.One of those little two-story farmhouses, with a floor plan like a

fat cross, with porches in the corners. But it’s just a memory, a fading snapshot of something you saw once, and the sobby little

catch behind your eyes when you saw it is gone forever.If you lived there, of course, you’d be standing there in your

window watching the big U-Haul go by, wishing your roof didn’tleak, your toilets worked right, and the stupid elms didn’t blockquite so much of the sun, and you’d watch the truck drive by,



2 L EVI MONTGOMERY

thinking, “Lucky them! A whole new start somewhere. That’s whatI need.”

Well, I can tell you from my own life, a whole new start ain’t allit’s cracked up to be! I cried like a baby all the way out of town.Poor Daddy! He had no idea what to do. That’s always been Mom’s

job, taking care of me when I get in my moods. For that matter, Ihad no idea what to do for myself. All I could think of was that I’dnever see my home again, never see any of my friends again,never get another one of those forever hugs she used to be so free

with and I WILL NOT CRY!Sorry. Much later now, all cleaned up and smiley. Well,

snivelly is what I am, but I’ll be quite all right.Oh, Auntie May! You have no idea how much I miss her

already! Well, maybe you do. Of course you do! I’m sorry, I justwasn’t thinking. Of course you know how much I miss her. Youknow how to miss people too, don’t you?

The house is great, though, although I’ve quite wrecked mygreat-house-telling-about-mood. It was such a cool mood, too.

Up on top of the front porch, the big front porch (as opposed to thelittle front porch, which is sort of off to one side, and then there’s ahuge one in the back), but up on top of this one there’s a room we

think started out life as an open balcony. It’s not a very deep room,but it goes all the way across the house. There’s a wall all the way

around that’s sided like the house, and the floor's painted the samescuffed old grey color as the porches, and the wall at the back issided, too. It’s not like normal siding, that sort of tapery stuff?You know what I mean? This is flat, with grooves across it whereone board has a gouge out of it so the next one up can sit flat.

Okay, I went down and asked Daddy, and he said to tell you tolook up “clapboard,” to see what it isn’t, and “coved siding,” to see

what it is. He said to tell you “Hi,” too. HI! Anyway, the wall behind me is coved siding, all the way up,and the wall around the edge is the same thing up to about myknees and then it’s all glass from there up, these old-fashionedlittle panes the size of sheets of paper, set three-by-three in frames

that slide up from the bottom and down from the top, except some



JILLIAN’S GOLD 3

of them don’t work all that well, and some of the glass is gone.Some of the places have ripped plastic sheeting over them, a couple

have cardboard, and one has nothing at all, just a hole.It’s drafty out here, but even now, with a distinct winter chill in the air, it’s not what I’d call cold. The people here may think so – they go around in these big parkas like they’re exploring thearctic, and they talk about all the snow they had last week. There’sno snow now, though, and it’s hard to imagine very much snowgoing away that fast. Unless it rained a lot, I guess.

I imagine in the summer, it’ll get pretty toasty up here. Youcome out here through a door in the end of the upstairs hall. And Iguess you might think the house is cross-shaped, because of what Isaid, but it’s more like a tee. Oh, and it’s not “toilets” that don’twork right, it’s “toilet.” Singular. And it does work okay,actually, but I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work, a teenagegirl sharing a bathroom with her Daddy. That’s officially poopy!

Okay, not much more to tell, except the trees in the front yard.They’re huge! I can’t even begin to hug them around, and I think

that if you and I could try it together, we couldn’t get all the wayaround. They’re by far the biggest trees I’ve ever seen, although Iwent for a walk yesterday, and every house for blocks around hasbig trees like that! I think they really are elm trees, although it’s

pretty tough to tell this time of year. For a city girl, anyway. Ahomeless, motherless, friendless, transplanted city girl.

Okay, bye now, Auntie May. Gotta go cry some more.

All my love and kisses and a tiny little sad-face, Jillybaby





Friday, 2 Jan 09

Well, this has got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever been

made to do. This is so stupid it’s useless. It’s beyond useless! It’s

embarrassing! It’s humiliating! Like that’s any big surprise. Every

single one of the stupid things they’ve made me do for five yearsnow have been useless and embarrassing and humiliating! Scream

therapy. That was pretty stupid. Pounding on that stupid

“punching bag”. This isn’t any stupider than that. At least they

said they weren’t going to read it. Although, if they were going

to, it might actually have been a little bit more fun, at least:

Dear Dr Buttwrench;Kiss my butt.

Sincerely,

Royal

OK, OK, I’m calm. I’m calm. I pumped some iron, and I did all

my breathing things, and I’m calm. Let’s assume there’s some

rationale for this pointless charade. Let’s assume it will makeitself known at some point. OK, then, let’s be rational.

My name is Royal (I swear to you I am not making this up)

Greene.

No, I do not have a sister named Kelly, and no, my parents

didn’t forget their last name wasn’t Blue, and yes, I’ve heard

those both before. My mother assures me they had no idea

people would hear my name and think of “Royal Blue.”

I do have a sister, and she has it even worse. Scarlett. With

two T’s. Scarlett Greene. Try living that down in middle school. I

call her Scary. She calls me Pain. As in – yeah, you get it.

I’m 18 years old, as I sit here writing this. I’m a senior in high

school. My birthday is 14 Oct 90. School starts back up on

Monday.



6 L EVI MONTGOMERY

There are some things we need to get clear, you and I,

whoever you are.

First off, this isn’t a diary. We don’t need no stinkin’ diaries!This is a journal. Lots of famous men kept journals. OK, right

now, I can’t think of any. Teddy Roosevelt. I bet he kept one.

JFK. Lots of men. Stop making fun of me. It’s not a diary.

Anyway, I don’t have a choice. Well, I do, but it wouldn’t be an

easy choice. There’s basically one person left in the world that

doesn’t hate me, one person left that I have any feeling at all

for, and if I don’t do what Dr Buttrich says, it’ll break her heart,and that’d be more than I could stand.

So this is for you, Mom. This is all for you.

Well, I guess that’s not true. The part about not feeling

anything. There’s a couple of girls at school I have some feelings

for, but I’m not sure what those feelings are. (I sure hope they

were serious about not reading this thing)

There’s this one girl at school. Her name is Geena. There’s acouple others, but I’ll use her for an example. Everybody at the

whole school knows Geena, and everybody knows she’s hot. She

has a very well-made body, and if I look at her body, if I start to

think about her body, I start to go a little funny around the gills.

But just watching her move, listening to her talk, watching her be

herself, it’s like there’s nothing else there. If I could have her

(which I can’t – there’s a couple of guys that would kill me if Ieven tried) I’m afraid it would only be for the bragging rights.

So that’s not hatred. I don’t know what it is, actually, but I’m

pretty sure it’s not hatred.

Then there’s this other girl, not a girl at school. She goes to a

private school somewhere. Her name is Zillah. I kid you not.

Biblical, I’m told. Anyway, Zillie’s skinny as a rail, her face is thin,

her mouth is at least twice as wide as her face, and her eyes are

like saucers. She has nine really dark, small freckles along her

jaw on one side, and none on the other side. Her hair’s as straight

as water poured from a pitcher, and her hands are long and bony

and cold. She’s got this habit where as soon as she sits down, her



JILLIAN’S GOLD 7

feet come out of her shoes and go up under her pointy little butt

so she’s sort of kneeling in the chair.

Every time I’m in the same room with her, I go funny aroundthe gills. No need to concentrate on her non-existent boobs (well,

almost non-existent) no need to think anything in particular. She

makes me go all funny. It started sometime during the summer.

So what’s up with that? That’s not hatred either.

Oh, and to add insult to injury, she’s like 9 or something. No,

not really – she’s a friend of Scary’s, which would make her about

14, which I guess wouldn’t be all that bad, but certainly badenough. If I was 28 and she was 24, nobody’d think a thing. I

think I’ll look elsewhere, anyway.

Except she does have this strange witching power. I go

through the dining room, where they’re huddled up, giggling over

some movie magazine that’s apparently all the homework they

have. My heart’s pounding a little, and my hands feel like they’re

ten sizes too big. I reach out and give Scary’s braided hair aswift jerk, hard enough to make her yelp, but only so that I can

tug Zillie’s hair in a pretense of fairness. I don’t tug as hard, and

Zillie only giggles, and I go on into the kitchen for a glass of

water I didn’t want, barely breathing, her giggle tinkling like

silver down my spine. All I wanted was the memory of her hair in

my fingertips.

She eats with us sometimes, and I stare at my plate, listeningto her talk. She and Scary gang up on Mom and my step-father,

teasing them with a barrage of one-liners rooted in everything

from Shakespeare to Clancy. (That’s if Dork-butt’s not eating in

the living room, watching TV, which he won’t let anyone else do)

Mom’s pretty bright, but Dork-face is really dumb, and neither

of them are what you could call quick-witted, and they squawk

and giggle, fumbling their replies until everybody’s laughing

except me. Well, I laugh, but I’m afraid to look up, afraid of

what will be branded into my forehead if I do, afraid of what

they might see in my eyes.

I have to find one my own age that makes me feel that way.



8 L EVI MONTGOMERY

And Scary. I guess I have a feeling for Scary that isn’t hatred.

She’s an all-right sort of a little sister, if you have to have a

little sister at all.OK, they said to write a lot. Well, “they” isn’t quite right. It’s

just Buttwrench. He and my Mom, I guess is what I mean by

“they.” They said they’re going to be checking for the amount

written between appointments and that’s all, but they said they

wanted me to write a lot, so here I am writing a lot. Just not

about what they thought I’d write about. Well, they said to write

about my feelings. Wrong feelings, is all.They said to write about how angry I felt, punching the wall,

but all I felt punching the wall was



Sunday, 4 Jan 09

School again tomorrow. No school since before Christmas.

Shadow. That’s what Zillah means in Hebrew, according to this

place on the internet. Well, according to a lot of places. I was

pretty thorough. Also, I started a conversation with, oh, justwhoever happened to be sitting around, ho hum, about ages and

birthdays, and she’s 14, but barely, born 17 Dec 94. She chews

her fingernails. Also her hair. She has that silly foot thing, and

she giggles a lot.

And I have no idea what any of this has to do with the price of

turkey poop. Anger, they said to write about. Write down all the

things you’re angry about.I’m angry that they think I’m angry. I’m angry that they think

I have an anger problem. Why is it that you either keep it all

bottled up and go around like you have a ramrod so far up your

butt you can’t move your lips, or you “have an anger problem”?

OK, so I did punch a hole in the wall once. Big deal. Every body

punches a hole in a wall once in their life. Well, I did it twice, I

guess, but still. Well, I don’t remember the first time, but therewasn’t anybody else it could have been. The people around me are

all so frustrating! They’re so stupid it drives me nuts! I don’t

have an anger problem — I have a surrounded-by-stupid-people

problem.

Tyson Clarke, at school, won’t leave me alone about my clothes.

Well, none of them do, but he’s like the ringleader or something.

I swear, at least once a day, he has to say something about “theman in black”. What is it to him if I wear black? What is it to him

if I won’t tell him why? Well, it’s a lot to him, apparently, but I

don’t know why. THAT’s frustrating.

Melany (or however you spell it) won’t leave me alone about

“helping her with her algebra.” I helped her once. She kept





JILLIAN’S GOLD 11

couch with his back to me, and my hands and arms could still feel

the weight of the dumbells, going up and down like hammers, and

I felt the same wave of buzzing greyness that makes me hitthings, and I could just feel that 35 pound dumbell caving in the

back of his head.





Jan 8, 2009

Dear Auntie May,I’m back in school now, and every day, when I get home, I want

to run next door and sit in your kitchen, doing my homework,watching you bake or sew or knit or whatever you’re doing. We’llsit there in your kitchen, listening to the traffic in the street below,and wait for Mom to get home from work. You’ll feed me hot, moistcookies and cold, cold milk, and I’ll tell you all about my day atschool. And then I remember I can’t run next door anymore.

I remember how your iron would slide back and forth like it was

a machine, and your face never wavered. Auntie May, I never toldyou this, but I used to try to shock you so badly that your ironwould hesitate in its path, just for a second. It was like trying toscore in some game. I’d tell you every sordid detail from my weirdsex-laden dreams, and you’d iron away, listening, and thenyou’d tell me how dreams work. I’d tell you about the things somegirl at school had said, using all the words she’d used, and you’d

just keep stroking, stroking, stroking, set the old iron up on its tail, shift the shirt or skirt or blouse around a little, stroke, stroke,stroke, and then when I was done, you’d tell me why those wordsdon’t work as well as others.

I’d watch your eyes, watching for the flicker of umbrage there,and I never saw it. I’d watch your hands, looking for a singlehesitation.

Do you know what would have happened if I’d asked my mother

what Gabby meant when she told me the thing I asked you aboutbefore Christmas? Daddy, I could have asked. Maybe it hassomething to do with the way you were raised, I don’t know. Hewould have just answered me, like you’d do, but there’s no way Icould ever have asked him that.



14 L EVI MONTGOMERY

Mom, no way. She might have slapped me. Well, she wouldn’thave slapped me, but she might have washed my mouth out with

soap. Actually, I don’t know what she would have done, because Inever asked her things like that. Mom was different. She loved mewith all she had, but she wasn’t like you and Daddy. I wonder what they ever saw in each other that made them even think theycould build a life together, much less what there was that made

them actually able to do it. And they did! You know how much they loved each other. All

the way here, we took turns starting the crying. Every couplehours, one or the other of us would start to sniffle, and then we’dstart to cry, and then sometimes, we’d have to pull over. Four daysof that. I’d never seen Daddy cry before that.

Now I come home from school, and there’s no one home at my place, and there’s no Auntie May in the next apartment, and Icome up here to my little sun-room. Well, it’s not mine, but I thinkof it that way. I don’t think Daddy’s ever come up here. I reallywish he’d come up here with me, some of these fine sunsetevenings. The house faces almost due west, and I guess there’s a lotof dust or something, because the sunsets can get pretty dramatic.I wish he’d come up here and sit with me and just watch, hotsteaming mugs of something in our hands, and the cloudsdrifting by. So odd to look west and not see any water at all.

We had this thing we had to do at school, a writing assignment,

where we had fifteen minutes to write about “The Most ImportantThing I’ve Ever Seen,” which is pretty stupid if you ask me. Mostof them wrote about “The Most Important Thing I Ever Saw WasWhen I Saw the Mayor,” or “The Important Night That I Saw

Britney Spears in Concert!” I wrote about watching the sun meltinto the ocean at Ocean Shores, about how, in those last fewmoments, it melts into liquid gold on the waves, and skitters

away, circling around behind you for tomorrow’s sunrise, and then I had to read it, and when I was done, there was this silence for a few seconds.

“Can you really look out over the ocean and not see land at all?” this boy dressed all in black asked me, and I think they’d think I



JILLIAN’S GOLD 15

was crazy if I told them that what’s really weird is looking outover the land and not seeing ocean at all.

I put cardboard up in all the broken places that didn’t have any,and now it gets good and warm up here in the afternoons. We putall the furniture from the deck in here, for now at least, and sinceit’s that really dark brown resin we all hated so much, it sits herein the sun and gets all warm, and then I come up here, and I sitand watch the people go by outside, and I do my homework. I don’t

think it’ll be too bad in summer, actually, because of the trees.

Also, the higher sun will mean the overhangs above the glass willgive more shade. I’ll open the windows on each side, and it’ll be cooland shady out here. There’ll be no homework, and I’ll sit here in theafternoons, reading Clarke and Heinlein and Marsh, turning themusty pages so slowly, savoring every word.

It’s later, now. I got too sniffley. Sniffly? I’ll have to get adictionary up here. Snuffle-up-a-gus, is what I got. I seem to cry alot more here than I ever did in the old place. Maybe it’s somethingin the air. Maybe the smell of old paint. There was a wooden chair up here, just that and nothing more, when I came up here that firstday, and it was so perfectly sad that I couldn’t sit in it. I sat on

the floor, against the wall, and I watched the dust dance in thesunbeams, and the sunbeams move across the wide grey boards,and I got my knees all wet from crying, pressing my knees into

my eye sockets and just BAWLING!The girls at school are different than the girls at my old school.

They seem to be fastened down, somehow, rooted, planted. Theywear jeans that look like they might last at least a few more weeks,and they don’t gather in the restrooms in big honking flocks,squabbling like gulls over the mirrors and sinks. They payattention in class, and they get good grades (or not, but if they

don’t, it’s not because “my crew don’ do homework”).I’ve met some people, now. I wouldn’t call any of them friends,yet, but I’m meeting people.

Oh, Auntie May! I wish we hadn’t had to move! I know why hewanted to, though. I can see his point. They’d lived in one city



16 L EVI MONTGOMERY

their whole lives, and every single thing he was ever going to seewas going to remind him of her. I can see that, but it’s just so

hard.Okay, gotta go. I need to get my homework done.

Hugs and kisses and little pouty-faces, Jillybaby



Friday, 9 Jan 09

There’s this new girl in school. No, this isn’t going to be like

that. This one’s way out of my league. She’ll get snapped up by

some jock, or one of the gangsteroids, long before I could ever

get up the courage to ask her out. It takes me like six weeks todecide I can ask some girl out. Well, I say that like I’ve got a lot

of experience. I’ve asked a girl out exactly five times in my life.

Anyway, this one reminds me of Zillie, but I can’t figure out

why. She doesn’t look much like her. Well, she doesn’t look

anything like her. She’s really, really pretty.

We had this thing in english class, where we had to write about

the most important thing you’d ever seen. Amber Snecks actuallywrote that the most important thing she’d ever seen was seeing

Britney Spears in concert. If that’s true, she’s led a pretty

pathetic life.

I didn’t know what to write, because I’ve never seen anything

important in my life. All I could think of to write was “nine dark

freckles,” and I didn’t think that would make any sense to

anybody else. It doesn’t even make much sense to me. Finally, Iwrote some pablum about a mother’s face when she looks at her

baby, but it was a lie. The most important thing I’ve ever seen is

nine dark freckles. The teacher didn’t call on me to read mine, at

least.

This new girl (her name is Jillian, but people call her Jill, and I

think she doesn’t like it. I’d know, wouldn’t I?) She wrote about

the sunset at some place on the west coast. She said “oceanshores,” but I don’t know if that’s a place, or just the shores of

the ocean. I googled it, and there’s a place in Washington state

called Ocean Shores, but I don’t know where she’s from. Anyway,

she wrote that when the sun goes down, it’s not going behind the

ocean – it’s sinking into it, and in the last seconds before it



18 L EVI MONTGOMERY

disappears, she said that if you watch really closely, you can see

it melt into liquid gold and skitter away across the surface,

running around behind you to come up again. When she got donereading it, there was silence for a while, but I suspect it was just

because people didn’t get it. I was quiet because I thought, for

just a minute, that I did get it, that I could see it. I thought I

could see something so much bigger than me, so much bigger than

any of us, so wide and so deep and so huge, that we can’t ever

measure up.

I tried not to say anything, because I was pretty sure I’d fail,but out pops this really stupid thing: “Can you really look out over

the ocean and not see land at all?” That wasn’t what I meant to

ask at all, and I was pretty sure everybody was going to laugh at

me, but nobody seemed to really notice. Except her. She noticed,

but she didn’t laugh at all. She just stroked her hand slowly

through her hair over and over, looking at me like Zillie looks at

me, that same exact look, direct and seeking. That doesn’t evenmake sense, does it? Seeking. It’s like she really wants to look at

you, like she really wants to know what you really meant to say,

like she knows you didn’t say at all what you meant to, and like

she thinks what you meant to say would of been interesting.

Not nine dark freckles after all. That look in someone’s eyes,

that’s the most important thing anybody could ever hope to see.



Jan 9, 2009

Dear Diary,Won’t this be fun? I’ve never kept a diary before. Auntie May

gave me this diary for Christmas, but since we were going awayanyway, and I was going to write so many letters, it seemed sortof like overkill to keep a diary.

Am I supposed to pretend this thing is a pen-pal, and I talk to it,like “Auntie May gave you to me for Christmas?” Okay, that’s

just stupid. There’s no way I’m going to pretend I’m talking to abook. Not even a robin’s-egg-blue leather book that’s so smooth and

so pretty and so Auntie May that it makes me want to cry. Well,it does.

Okay, later now, and I gave it a lot of thought, and here’s whatI’m going to do. Since I don’t know the conventions, I’ll just makesome up. I’m going to write in here as though I’m telling a storyabout someone. Third-person. I’ll keep a third-person diary. How’s

that sound?See, the thing is, there are some things I need to write about,

things I need to think about, that I couldn’t ever put down in aletter for Auntie May. Things I can’t even put down with wordslike me and myself and I. Maybe this’ll be better.

Okay, here we go:

Her name is Jillian May Decker. She is seventeen, but just

barely, having been born the day after Christmas in a car thatwas overturned in a snowbank. Having brought her into the worldwith such drama, the universe decided she would henceforth berequired to live a totally drab life, and there was no further dramaat all until the night of November 17th, 2008. This was aMonday, and our hero’s mother was on her way back to her car



20 L EVI MONTGOMERY

after a dance class. City parking being what it is, she’d had to park three blocks away.

Picture this, then:Late evening. Downtown Seattle, Washington. City life never pauses any more, so there’s a busy river of traffic slishing past.Neon lights, reflecting in the puddles from the lines of slushalong the curbs. The humming rush of busyness. A tall thin man

flicks a cigarette butt in annoyance, slaps his unanswered cell phone closed. He’s standing on the curb, waiting for a light, and

next to him is a stranger, a plainish woman in her mid thirties.She’s damp and sweaty-looking, like she’s just finished a danceclass. She flinches her head around toward him, startled by thesheer anger of the slap of the phone. Their eyes meet for a second,and he shrugs a tiny grin at her: sorry, just ticked off. She smilesher little secret smile at him, turns away, and slumps down on thesidewalk without a sound. The passenger in a passing Mercedeshas fired a single shot, just because, just to see what would happen,he said, and the plainish woman in her late thirties has a tiny holein her forehead.

They told Jillian there was no mess, no real blood, just that tinyhole. It was a small gun, with just enough power to enter the skull,

just enough power to scramble her brain. Just enough power to killa person. Jillian’s life did not end that day, as it should have. Jillian did

not take a bullet to her brain that day, as she should have. Jilliandid not save her mother’s life that day, as she should have, andnow all she can do is cry and cry and cry as she tries to go on, towalk away from that tableau on the street corner, to move away

toward the rising sun of her own young life.Doesn’t the sun always come up again?

Written much later: Jillian’s father, David Ethan Decker, is a calm and patient man,centered deep within himself, held there by an anchor Jillian hasenvied many times. The suddenness with which he came adrift at

the loss of his love fills Jillian with a profound dread. If Daddy, inhis unflappable calm, has begun to flap so badly, then what will



JILLIAN’S GOLD 21

become of her? It’s not the loss of a place to lean that bothers her,it’s the thought that if this ill wind is strong enough to drag even

HIS anchor, then what will become of her?Somehow, they find their way through the days and weeks tocome, picking their meager toeholds and fingernail grips slowlyand carefully, pilgrims in a snowstorm, narrowly avoiding theDonner’s Pass of emotional cannibalism that waits for them,lurking in the swirling blizzard. Staggering through the wind,

they each begin to grope for the hands of the other, Jillian leaning

on her Daddy like she hasn’t since she hit the confusion of all those hormones a couple of years ago, and Daddy clinging to her like he never has.

Through it all, there is one beacon, shining like a searchlight through the glooming fog, like a lighthouse in a storm: Daddy’solder sister, May.

Daddy’s MUCH older sister, May. How much older has never been made clear to Jillian, and though she has asked, with thesimple openness with which she asks Auntie May everything else,she’s never been answered. Other things are never discussed either,although Auntie May never seems to be bothered by any question.Some of them she simply never answers, gently deflecting thesubject by that scant fraction of an inch that has her answeringsome other question, something Jillian did not, in fact, ask, butwhich is enough to satisfy her.

The things left unanswered are things like: Why isn’t shemarried? Why does she live next door to them, in the nextapartment? Who is the young man in the beads and beard in theold photograph on the piano? Why is she so quiet, so calm, soanchored? That, she shares with Daddy. Why, come to think of it,did she not move away with them?

Daddy’s thirty-six. Auntie May seems perhaps a dozen years

older than that. Fifty? Who knows. She doesn’t work, or at leastshe doesn’t have a job. She does write, and it does sell, but Jillian’snot sure that’s really how she lives. She may have other money.

Okay, here’s Jillian’s supposition: Auntie May had a – boyfriend? husband? beau? A man of some

sort, at any rate. Jillian took the picture out of the frame once,



22 L EVI MONTGOMERY

when Auntie May wasn’t around, and on the back it says17JUN71. She remembers clearly the odd symmetry of the date.

There’s no telling who he was, or where Auntie May met him, or anything. There’s beach in the background, and an old ruined pier, and that’s all Jillian knows.

Anyway, in Jillian’s fantasies, they were married, and he waskilled in some way that brought her a big enough wad of settlement money that she can live fairly easily off of a thin

trickle of short stories for women’s magazines. The stuff she

writes is so unlike her, it makes Jillian laugh just to read it. All those weak, silly women, giggly and twittery, fumbling their way through inane mishaps, and coming up smelling like rosesand seeming strong, in spite of themselves. She says you have towrite that way, or you don’t sell. If they seem strong andindependent, then you can only sell them to magazines for women that hate men, and if they’re weak and stupid all the way

through, then you can only sell them to magazines for men whohate women. Waddle along with one foot on each side of the fence,and at least you won’t starve.

But Auntie May herself seems like a throwback to those womenyou read about in pioneer times: strong and strong-willed, firmand firm-minded, a heart of gold and a will of iron. She lives her life like those women, too, living on the surface, living simply,living in her own time and space.

She irons clothes in a day when no one else does, and if you askher why, when she could save so much time if she bought clothes

that don’t wrinkle, she’ll ask you what she would do with the timeshe saved? Watch Hollywood make a fool of itself? She darns her socks, bakes her bread without a bread-making machine, chopsonions and celery and garlic with a long French knife. Ask her why she doesn’t have a food processor, she says “This processes

food, doesn’t it? And I can get it clean like that!” she’ll tell you,rinsing it.When Mom died, when Jillian’s mother died, Auntie May cried

as hard as any pioneer woman would have, losing a friend andsister. Well, sister-in-law, yes, but sister-in-heart, too, and she didcry. She cried long and hard, but she cried fixing dinner for the



JILLIAN’S GOLD 23

people who came, she cried making a dress to bury her in, she cried packing her clothes for charity, because Daddy couldn’t face it.

Then she dried her tears and moved on. Jillian and her Daddy moved away, because he couldn’t live in the same city he’d known her in his whole life, but even so, AuntieMay still shines like a beacon in the dark night that still leadsaway from Jillian to that far sunrise.

Later:

I was going to write about Jillian’s Daddy, but I find I can’tnow. Perhaps tomorrow. And none of this is anything even remotely like the things I

need to write about.I’m such a little chicken.





onehe old rusty hammer head fits his hand like a fat rock, andhe’s a caveman, cracking shellfish open beneath a sky of

pouring smoke. The elms are huge ferns, and the curious headsof brontosaurs dip down to watch him. The shellfish are assmoky as the sky, firm and slimy.T

In summers, the hammer head was his cap-popper, popping long coils of bumpy little dots, unrolled on the scarred sidewalk.He’d be a machine in a factory, a machine whose job was to popgrey bumpy dots in perfect staccato, his other hand dragging thepaper belt through the machine pop pop pop pop. Each new popleft its own smoky star, till the sidewalk in front of their step wasblurred completely grey.

Spring and fall, Baker’s Drugstore didn’t sell caps. In the fallhe’d hammer acorns and chestnuts and the fat, thorny heads of maple spinners, the tiny slivers flying like shrapnel. In the spring,there was nothing, and the hammer head was pressed into serviceas a jet fighter, deep behind enemy lines, swooping and strafing

and circling.In the winter, it was his windowsill race-car, his bedspread-

mountain skier, his dogsled across the frozen kitchen tundra. The voices from their bedroom, carefully lowered in hissing whispered shouts, were Arctic gales.

The spring he was twelve, the old grocery by Baker’s was torndown, and huge rumbling machines in all the yellows you could

ever think of built a big new building there. He stood in thestreet outside the chain-link fence they put up, his toes kicking against the curb and his eyes squinching out the sun, the hammerhead dangling dull and dead against his leg. Each machine had aman inside, but the man did nothing. He was nothing; he was acaptive, held there in his glass cage for the machine to brag about



26 L EVI MONTGOMERY

to its buddies. The machines built the building, but when they were done, they let the men out to clamber a scaffold against the

walls, putting bricks over the concrete.Sometimes a man only needs half a brick, and then he shoutsdown from his perch to a fat sweaty man with a cigar. The fatman does a villain act to the brick’s damsel in distress, slicing herin half on a huge saw whose screams drown out her own. Theleft-over pieces pile against the bulging fence, and the fat manbites his cigar and slices up another screaming maiden.

The fence bulged so far and so high that bits of brick began tosift down over the curb, piling there like rubble in a miniaturebombed-out German town, and his feet were American tanks tothe rescue, pinned-down GIs swarming from their weeks-long hiding places, their uniforms tattered, their faces stubbled withdays and days of hopeless grey. One piece was almost half abrick, and one black sneaker tank shoved it farther and fartherout of the German town, until he could swoop down unseen and

grab it up and carry it home against his chest, the hammer headscratching angrily.

The voices wash against him like the tide against a rock, like wind on stone, like sheeting rain against a cliff. He taps the brick in little crunching bites, not hitting hard, not big slamming blows,brick dust flying out like shrapnel. Tiny taps, firm hard little taps,short terse words, bitter, mother, job, cracks like webs, like ice,

you, you, me, spreading cracks like webs, out, out, out, till thebrick calves off another berg to the grey bay of the scarred con-crete, it’s over. Out. Out. Out.

Each fresh red shard of brick, the hammer head pounds tosand, pounds to dust, pounds to a rusty smear in the grain of theconcrete, till the grey stars of before all are gone.

hat summer, with the house so quiet, he perfected the artof popping, each perfect fall of the hammer head popping

one cap, each grey bump on the long red tape popped, the papernever torn beside the holes, the stars all stacked up in the rain- washed red dust with a grim perfection. That fall, in school, thehammer head fell silently in time to his own heartbeat, the wavesof sound washing out the teacher’s voice, the echoes of their

T



JILLIAN’S GOLD 27

voices, the sounds of thuds and slammings. That silent hammer-fall drowned out everything he didn’t hear until the year was over,

and he took his pounding to the shed out back.No bricks this spring. He found a cracked quart jar of rusty nails, and he pounded them one by one into the old workbench,driving each rust-red crew-cut head below the surface with a finalblow so harsh the dust jumped up scared. When the nails weregone, he hammered the glass jar to shards, to splinters, to spark-ling dust so fine it floated like pixies in the sideways sun. Hespent all his days that summer in the shed, hammering.

When the glass was gone, his dusty explorations turned up atiny skull, and he broke out each yellowed tooth, hearing screams.He cracked the skull, hearing long moans sloping down intonothing at all forever. He powdered the bone, hearing his owngiggles echo down a long hall somewhere.

When the skull was gone, when he’d extracted all the days of exquisite pain he could from that tiny relic, he searched among

the weeds along the shed’s back wall, and found a nest of tiny baby somethings, wiggling in a warm fuzzy heap. The first one,he hammered on the head, and it went so still so fast, there wasno release at all. The next, he hammered slowly, three times,hindquarters, body, head, and that was better. By the last one, it was foot, foot, tail, foot, foot, hindquarters, body, all slow andprecise and methodical, and then wait till the sharp yelping

squeals are sliding down that long last slope and do the headquick before it gets away without you.

hen he went back to school that fall, the hammer head was retired, sitting on a shelf above his pounding place,

Pounder Emeritus, watching all he’d learned. For kittens andglistening garter snakes, you need more leverage, a better grip,and he sneaked in the moonlight down the long crunching alley till he found an open shed and a big ball-peen hammer, with a fatsalt-stained handle. Days are gone now, lost to the useless drudgeof school, but his hammerings are better suited to the midnightsanyway, and he sneaks out to the shed at the bottom of the long yard, breathing the still night air, his feet wet in the grass, moany gaspy breathing from her bedroom mingling with his own.

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28 L EVI MONTGOMERY

Each kitten, each captured field mouse, each struggling spar-row, maimed already from his snare, wears that rusty crew-cut.

He holds the hammer close up by the head, for perfection of control, for just enough force, and each tiny tap is a step closer tothat final blow.

Please visit my website at

www.levimontgomery.com

to purchase a copy of Jillian's Gold

Jillian's Gold -- an excerpt from my 3rd novel

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