The Home Jar: Stories: Stories

Furgus Welcomes You

Furgus Welcomes You A ngel a Dahlgren was the fir st to hear it. The sound wasn’t thunderous and it wasn’t messy — that was something she could have handled. Her family had once been a lot bigger and a lot noisier; it was all thunder and mess, and that was what she was used to. The women had kept the volume loud and steady; the men threw in a moo from time to time. They were farmers or not farmers, that’s how they thought of themselves, in terms of farming, and the farming was in their voices — low and earthy efforts at sounds that arrived spaced apart, the words furrowed into separate rows. She used to think of the men as terribly thoughtful, plowing through a thick soil of brain matter to get to just the right syllable. Now she didn’t think of them that way. She had married into robert’s family and watched it grow and grow in membership while her own family impossibly dwindled. it was only her mother now and an unmarried older brother, a farmer, thirty-eight years old, who had recently placed a personal ad in Farm Journal. Sometimes during the mornings she and her mother made the long journey to McDonald’s, fifty-five miles away. if it was raining, her brother tagged along, stretched out in the backseat, lonely and bleak as the iowa weather. Would like a pretty wife, his ad began. The long van (the kind used by daycare centers) was otherwise empty; there was none of the excited Sunday squawking from her husband’s wildly branching family about who was going to order what. in their town of Furgus, 50 F UrGUS W eLCoMe S YoU traditions were adhered to, and Sundays meant church, and after church meant McDonald’s. When three generations of her in-laws werepackedintothelongvan,traditiondictatedthattheeldestson inherit the driving rights. That meant robert, Angela’s husband, despite his recently broken arm. A long plaster cast imprisoned the right arm in mid-throw. even with his limb thus crooked like an Allen wrench, he wasn’t about to surrender his inheritance. The driving rights were his due, and he wasn’t giving them up even if everybody’s life was imperiled. Angela’s father-in-law, still the hometown basketball hero at sixty eight, conceded the pilot’s chair but sat shotgun as co-pilot, lording over his bequest. During the week, though, it was just Angela and her mother and brother, the three of them vague and clinging — flyover pathetic was how she chose to describe their threesome, imagining the word spewed out by disgusted sophisticated east Coasters — because, yes, she read The New Yorker. She worried about the fumbling effect on her sons, but no, there was no worry. They would never grow up to be like her. Both of them looked just like robert, increasing her sense of depletion. Her own genes were too faded and ghostly; they didn’t stand a chance against her husband’s advancing army. Her family members were like longjohns hanging emptily on the laundry line, if not sickly and wan in color, then blown away completely by death’s wind. Her grandparents some years before. Her father not long after. Then her sister, just last year, her first plane ride ending in disaster. When she heard it — that sound — she wished she hadn’t, but at least it was something, something definite — finally, something. She was leaving Furgus with her mother and brother when the van suddenlybecameevenmoresilent,asifanunnotedbuzz haddrawn attention to itself by switching off. once at McDonald’s her brother briefly came to life, putting away two Value Meals and telling them about some future wife who had answered his personal ad; they 51 Nancy Zafris were meeting at a halfway point, the Dairy Bar in Larksburg. Her mother, a quart drinker of heavily-sugared coffee, triumphantly ordered the cheapest size, then held out her tiny cup for umpteen free refills. By the time she was done, lipstick and nervous chewing had left bloody toothmarks around the styrofoam rim. A castle of sugar packs toppled and poured to the floor as her mother tripped over the table on their way out. Then of course she twice needed bathroom breaks on the ride home. Since there were no rest stops or gas stations or even trees, Angela simply pulled over to the...