Before We Sleep
Page 13
Her mother had pointed out the other seasonal absences that would disturb his plan—deer season, sugaring in March, times when older children were out of school for days, sometimes weeks. Plus the daily chores, mornings and afternoons these children were depended upon to help perform. But her father had replied, “They would make do! The parents would make do. For it is a lesser season. And if they had their children for the longer length of the year …”
He’d never won that argument even in his own home but his daughter remembered it and so in her second year teaching trimmed back her expectations for those first weeks, the last also. Made it possible for children to miss school if needed at home without, well, truly missing school. For the others, the near majority who were there almost every day, she saw her silent, never-mentioned plan as simply a way to allow them to engage. To reenter free of panic or turbulence. Three weeks of easy reading, simple assignments, minimal papers due. Token tests. Enough so none of her colleagues caught on, leave alone the bullheaded administrators; enough though so she saw the truth in her father’s words. And felt distinct pleasure that in such a way, small as it was, his idea might be vindicated.
And there was pleasure also in easing back into her third year of teaching. By fall she could barely remember the last months of the previous year after Oliver returned. How she’d worked through the rest of that year. So she, too, was beginning again. But, as she thought of herself, as more so.
One afternoon she’d driven to school under a sullen sky with a steady drizzle and drove home to a breaking sky with high shafts of sunlight bold and strong, flooding light down upon the village, and the streets and roads dry, pulled in and found mounds of cordwood dumped in the yard. A splitting block surrounded by piles of firewood ready to be moved into the shed for the old range, most down the bulkhead to feed the great furnace for the winter. Oliver at work with his shirt off, his upper body still slender but she saw then that he’d gained strength through the summer, slowly, working about the place. He’d heard her coming and wiped sweat from his brow and grinned as she stepped from the car parked just short of the woodpile. He said, “Why don’t you change out of those fancy duds and let’s move some wood. I got an hour before I have to be down to the store.”
“I could do that,” she said. A little irritated. She’d wanted to make a cup of tea and relax and then take on the handful of papers. They might be meager but the closer she looked the better idea she’d have of what to expect in the months to come.
“While you’re at it,” he said, “could you bring me out a cold beer?”
Suddenly short she stopped and said, “Last I looked the icebox was empty of beer. Ice, too, pretty much.” Then turned and went on, feeling like a snipe.
And he was right behind her. So she threw back the screen door and entered the house and stopped. A brand-new Frigidaire sat where the icebox had been, gently humming. The icebox moved to the side, compartment doors ajar. She stopped and something small tore within her and she turned and said, “Damn it, Oliver. I wish your dad would let us get things as we can. I know he means well but, but …” And then she sank to the floor and was crying. She didn’t even know why she was crying but she was.
And he stood over her. So it seemed. He said, “Ruthie. I earn it.”
She looked up. “Do you? Do you, Oliver? Is that how it is or are your parents betting on a future they pray will come? Are they? Because I’m not seeing it, Oliver. I wish I was and I hate myself telling you this but I’m just not. They can’t even have you in the store regular hours. What do you do, Oliver? What do you do?”
He stood looking down at her. Then lifted his eyes and his chin and stepped over her and opened the refrigerator and lifted out a bottle of Narragansett and turned and walked out of the house.
Half an hour later when she went to look for him, he was gone. The bottle of beer sat opened but untouched, upon the chopping block. She lifted the beer and considered it but she didn’t care for beer. There was a bottle of rye in the house, those rare occasions when she wanted a nightcap, always when alone, always silently toasting her father’s memory first, then thinking of her mother, who best she let on, best Ruth knew, was happy rambling about the big empty house up on West Hill. Perhaps not so empty—filled as it must be with a lifetime, a good chunk of which Ruth had no memory or even knowledge of. Ruth sank down on the round of raw, freshly sawn wood, the sweet scent of autumn rising from it, and considered her day. Which had been grand until an hour ago but that hour was enough to sour everything. And she was to blame. All he’d been doing was making sure they’d be warm in the winter; proud of the new appliance, which, she could admit now, she also was happy to have in the house; and wanting to share that moment with her. And now he was gone.
Her first thought was to go looking for him. Enough so that she walked to the Chevy and sat behind the wheel. There, she didn’t calm so much as slowly realize that he’d left because he didn’t want to be there and she was responsible for that. She leaned and rested her forehead against the wheel with the weight of her fault.
After a while she went in the house and changed to jeans and a workshirt and moved all of the split wood to the cellar, trundling down the rough stairs through the bulkhead and up again. Even with her small loads the work was finished soon enough. She took up the axe and set it down again—she’d never split wood and knew this wasn’t the time to try and learn. Dusk was pooling from the shadows as the sun sank and she was suddenly cool, the sweat drying against her as the day died. She thought again of driving about the village but knew she wouldn’t find him.
She returned to the house and stood before her desk, turned the light on and off again. There would be no work done this evening. Finally she went to the new Frigidaire and stood before it, listening to the hum. She reached and tugged the handle and nothing happened, paused, and slid her hand to the other end and the door swung open. Bright and clean, a small fog of cool air rose about her. A truly wonderful thing. And she saw it was partly stocked—some few items from the icebox but a grocer’s box worth of new items; jars of condiments, fresh eggs, a wedge of cheese in paper, a couple of other butcher-paper-wrapped bundles that she knew held bologna and hard salami and on top a larger package with the black grease pencil scrawl T-bone. A treat clearly intended for their supper. And a second bottle of Narragansett.
She opened the small freezer compartment. A cave lined with frost. Empty but for two metal trays with a lever along the top. New ice cubes in the making. A novelty for her. And she saw it then—the meal planned and the two beers for Oliver and the new ice for her own celebratory drink. This late in the fall the ice for the icebox was furred in sawdust and the ice pick largely retired—the ice only for keeping food fresh or worked over hard to free clean ice for special occasions.
She walked to her desk and stood looking at the telephone. Snow’s Mercantile closed at seven but he might be there; where else would he have gone? On foot? Truth was, just about anywhere. Including his parents’ house. But it was more that stopped her—the telephone switchboard was still in a side room of the Mercantile, one with its own entrance and otherwise apart from the store. But she couldn’t bring herself to ring through and ask Doris Chapman to connect her to the store—Doris would know not only who it was, and if he was there or not, her calling would be noted. Especially if he was not there or did not answer. So wherever he was, he was beyond her.
She went and drew a bath, leaving the bathroom door open so a small shaft of light came through from the hall. She stripped out of her jeans and workshirt and again the smell of wood and her own sweat flooded her and she almost cried again. Then poured soap flakes from a box as the water thundered in and watched the small lather of bubbles rise. Lavender replaced wood and sweat. She tied up her hair and stepped in and sank down slowly until she was immersed, the nape of her neck resting against the lip of the tub, the soap bubbles swathing over her. Gently she scrubbed herself and then remained, lying in the tub with her kneecaps rising an
d gleaming in the light, staying until the water grew cool.
She pulled the plug with her toes and when the water had drained stood and toweled herself off. Reached up and untied her hair and shook it free, feeling damp cool ends flagging her shoulders. She left her clothes on the floor, kicking them into a corner, and padded down the hall and into the full dark of their bedroom, resisting the urge to turn on a light. She felt she deserved to be in the dark, a senseless penance but what she had. From the hook on the outside of the closet door she lifted down her summer nightgown and pulled it over her head. This night in September, she knew, would be cool enough so by morning she’d want flannel but was unwilling to rummage in the chest or closet or drawers—she had no idea where that nightgown might be. And, without Oliver, perhaps she deserved to be cold.
She was atremble throughout her and had the sudden urge for a cigarette, knowing even as she did that she was struggling to find, to make some connection with her abruptly absent husband. She was the one he could trust, the one who took him as he was, and she’d let him down. Her mind cast wide: Though he smoked he was occasional more than regular with the habit and wasn’t like some men who kept cigarettes about the house. A pack in his pocket, was Oliver. Then had a memory of a week ago, perhaps more, when they’d been driving back from her mother’s, back from a dinner where he’d been funny and charming and attentive and after the three hours he’d tossed the keys to her car to her and sat in the passenger seat while she drove home. But along that drive he’d pulled a crumpled pack from his trouser pocket and lighted a smoke and then opened the glove box and dropped the remainder of the pack within. Perhaps it had been empty, perhaps a bent cigarette or two remained.
She went down through the mostly dark house, pausing in the kitchen to find a book of matches in a drawer and went out into the night. On bare feet into early autumn dew, then the gravel of the drive, the car ahead a lump in the night. When she heard the sound.
A low keening. Muffled and distant and indistinct but a sound of pain. An animal caught or injured, possibly a human crying a terrible strangled register. She stepped back off the drive and into the dark, toward the bulkhead. And from there saw a wobbling light issuing from the single window of the workshop the back of the barn. There was no electricity in the barn and she walked on ginger toes along the side and the sound grew both more and less clear.
She rounded that back corner and stopped before she reached the window. The light was from an old kerosene lantern within. She tiptoed forward and peered through the glass.
There, seated on an old upturned apple crate was her husband. The lamp burned on the workbench he’d built that summer. His eyes were closed, his head bent down as he worked a bow against an old small fiddle.
She backed away from the window and stood fully on her bare feet in the cold grass. After a bit she went around to the woodpile and slowly and cautiously carried the smallest round her scrabbling fingers could find back around again to the back of the shed. She set it upright in the grass, out of the thrown rectangle of wobbling light and perched upon it, listening to her husband play the fiddle.
It was a simple piece he was playing, a jig or reel or lament—she had no idea, but the sort of song a child would learn. A single verse followed by a chorus, both of no more than a half-dozen notes, repeated over and over. There was a bit in the chorus where the tempo increased and he labored over that, slowing down in fact to find the notes and get them right. And in both chorus and verse he hit wrong notes and would pause and the bow would bounce and scrape and then he’d find his way again. Times he’d get it right all the way through and times that would happen over and again and he’d pick up the tempo a bit, seeking the time of the tune he heard in his mind against what he was playing. Then again he’d miss and scrape and halt and slowly find his way again into the song.
She sat a long time, listening. The log was small but large enough so she was able to lift her feet from the cold ground and tuck her heels atop the wood and hold her knees with her arms and rest her head on one shoulder. At one point she stole off the log and again glanced through the window, the least slice of vision into the room.
His head was lifted and his eyes were closed, his face lit by the glow of the lantern and a good bit more. The bow gliding and his fingers upon the neck of the fiddle moving as if the music was flowing through them down upon and out of the strings, the body of the little fiddle. She watched, long as she could. She’d never seen him so peaceful.
He was still playing when she went in to bed. When she woke in the morning he was beside her, his slumber deep. She slipped from bed and went down, the night almost as a dream, but knowing something had changed.
Something good, she hoped.
Five
Katey
She spent the night in Portland in a cheap motel on the edge of town. The windows didn’t open and it was stuffy and warm, the sheets on the bed seemed to have been scraped with a dull razor and the mattress was lumpy. There was a television but it was connected to a device to feed quarters into and she wasn’t about to spend money that way. She wished there was a radio but was also half-glad there wasn’t. Music had not been kind, this day. She’d thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep but moments after she turned off the light and heaved back and forth punching the pillow, she paused, then slept hard.
What happened was half an hour or so after leaving Machias she fell apart. All she’d been doing was driving south, backtracking her day, the road toward Ellsworth, tumbling gently all that she’d just left, small tentative probes from her mind about the people she’d met, who they were, how they’d looked upon her, what they’d said, the impossibility of it all and yet a sense of determination was gritting along within and then “Homeward Bound” came on the radio and she broke down. Pulled off in a sandy turnout past a crossroad hamlet that had no name, or not one she’d seen. She was weeping with her forehead against the wheel.
Home, homeward. She wanted to go home—the house on Beacon Hill, her bedroom, the living room, kitchen. She’d left town without telling anyone. She wanted her mother, her father, his kind placid somewhat quizzical eyes, the moments of tentativeness she caught out on him since she’d been told the truth, and her heart felt to be a raw swollen thing cramping inside her. The money in the envelope—she guessed she’d lost her job now but there remained the letter from the University welcoming her to the class of 1970. There was money enough, she knew. From her grandmother dead these five years. She wanted to call home but couldn’t, what would she say? They knew, she was certain, what she was up to. Many things, but her mother was no fool and would’ve discovered the missing Christmas cards if she even needed to look—again, how much did they know before she’d even undertaken this trip, how much guessed at what she’d do? Her father, certainly. The one who watched her. Her mother, less so. Pinned down into her dry dutiful life, grinding on, living through her work, a loveless marriage.
What she endured. Her mother. What she endured to walk each day about the halls of the school, to maintain herself in the village, the town. Her sense of self. Arch and removed. Brittle. Yet proud also, her chin high, mouth set firm. It was as if, Katey thought, there were two Ruth Hale Snows: the daughter of her parents, and the wife of her husband. And there also, as if on a cushion of air, she floated through both identities within the town, the village, her work at school, for the simple and extraordinary reason that the town saw both of these Ruths, understood, accepted and even embraced both.
Or tolerated because they had no choice. And who among them would give voice to that toleration?
She wanted to call home and could not. Whoever answered, whoever accepted the charges, she couldn’t speak to. Neither of them on an early summer Sunday afternoon.
But Virginia seemed impossible. The idea of Virginia seemed impossible. Not only the considerable distance but following through on this impulse. Not so simple an impulse she reminded herself but then had no idea what it was. Some emptiness wanted filling.
Outside, beyond the windshield, the afternoon lay before her. Lovely and long. And it came to her then: I don’t have to decide anything right now. I’m on my own. And like a small distant bell ringing clear up a valley on a Sunday morning she recalled Molly Ivey talking about the health food store in Portland. And thought Maybe, this day, that’s enough, to stay close but see something I never seen before. To take a bit of time, to allow her mind to settle. To allow the day a chance to settle. And out of that some direction might well arise.
She still hadn’t figured out distance. Midafternoon and even on Route 1 South it seemed she jigged and jagged north or west along or around the inlets and bays as much or more than headed south. South-southwest was what it was. When she finally got into Portland she drove the angled streets of the rundown downtown and stopped twice on bold whims to stop passersby and ask where Milk & Honey was. The first knew nothing, almost alarmed by her or the question. Circled three more blocks and saw a kid, a teenage boy kicked back against a lamppost, smoking a cigarette tucked into the corner of his mouth. Maybe fifteen. He listened, then swept her up and down with lust-addled eyes he failed to hide with a curl of scorn in his voice as he told her.
Walking distance. So she fed a nickel into a meter and locked the truck and walked.