The Testament of Harold's Wife

by Lynne Hugo

  I endured all of them giving me accusing looks as I waited for the whistle of the kettle (a noise that usually makes Marvelle run for cover, but it was a measure of her annoyance that she sat her ground on the kitchen table, all the while giving me the evil eye). “Can’t you just be nice?” I said, pouring Marvelle a saucer of milk and with a splash of bourbon for company and adjusting my tea to Plan Courage Strength. “There’s no way I’m backing out. I could just use the support of my friends.”

  Marvelle swished her tail, which I took as assent. We drank our tea, and I had chocolate bourbon balls rolled in powdered sugar that were Mom’s recipe (I made them yesterday after CarolSue asked me how much I was drinking) while the girls had grapes; then I went to the bathroom, put on some lipstick, and combed my hair. When I came out, I opened my arms and announced, grandly I thought, “It’s time!” The moment was spoiled by JoJo squawking and flapping her way from the floor in front of the refrigerator to one of the straight-back chairs at the kitchen table, and then over to the top of the wingback chair, as if she’d suddenly reconsidered because I’d said something about which we should all be frightened to death.

  “Gus? Hello, Gus, this is Louisa Hawkins calling. How are you?” At first, I had pressed the phone tightly to my ear, but the baritone that answered startled me into pulling it away from my head. Now I tried to figure how to put my mouth close enough that he could hear me but keep the receiver far enough away that I not go deaf when he responded. Nothing is ever simple. Have you noticed this about life? It’s true. Don’t make the mistake of thinking I only say that because I talk to chickens and a cat. If you’re ever old and alone and you’ve lost everything, you’ll talk to animals or birds, too, at least one. If you’re smart, that is. Don’t be fooled about me; I know exactly what I’m doing. And what I’m telling you about life is true: it’s always got more layers than you expect, which is what I really mean when I say nothing is ever simple.

  Maybe Gus is, though. His opening pleasantries boomed through the receiver, his voice deeper than I remembered it. Or just louder. “Yes, I’m doing quite well,” I got in, “and I imagine you’re happy that work on the bridge is finished. That detour was quite an inconvenience, wasn’t it? Must have gotten your car all dusty.” Did that sound sincere? It wasn’t, but irritated teachers get practice sounding sweetly sincere by dealing with difficult parents and administrators, so I thought I pulled it off.

  I took a swallow of tea, which wasn’t nearly strong enough so I fixed that, and steadied myself while Gus waxed expansively about how the detour had interfered with his critical role in the county. You’d have seriously thought that bridge being out had deterred him from catching four or five of the fugitives on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

  Finally, I couldn’t take anymore. “So, Gus, I’ve been thinking. It’s been a couple months since you mentioned it, and maybe it’s not proper for me to bring it up, but . . .”

  Thank heaven, he took the bait. “Dinner at the Lodge! Louisa, that would be an honor, a mighty honor if you would accompany me, in fact, the next monthly get-together is a week from tomorrow, it’s the second Friday of the month, see, and that’s a week from tomorrow if you’ll check your calendar, you’ll see that . . .”

  Good grief. If he said it again my eardrum would explode and the calendar would self-immolate. Of course I knew. I cut him off, trying to disguise it as enthusiasm. “Oh! So soon! How lovely. That would be perfect! What time? Would you like me to meet you there?”

  “I’ll pick you up at five thirty. We’re big-time, don’t you know? Open bar.” Chuckle, chuckle.

  Open bar. Maybe there was hope. Having him pick me up was something of a relief to me, even though I’d rather have my own car. “Well, thank you very much. I’ll look forward to it.”

  “And, Louisa, if you ever need any help around the place, you let me know, hear? I know Gary is real busy with the church.”

  “Oh yes, and such a good thing that he is, too. Bless his heart.”

  “Isn’t it, though. You must be proud.”

  “You could say that.” I don’t know what I actually would say instead, though. “I’ll see you a week from tomorrow. Thank you again, Gus.”

  CarolSue and I had a good laugh over the whole thing, although I know she worries about Gary. She says I’m going to need him and reminds me that she’s older than I am, but I won’t think about that. There’s only so much a mind can hold, and then it’s pointless as pouring water into a glass that’s already full.

  * * *

  That week passed more slowly than I wished it would, even though the girls and I were busy. CarolSue coached me on what to wear (“No! Not that old blue thing! I’ve ordered a dress, a skirt, and two tops online, and they’ll be there in the mail by Tuesday. All of them are in style, which I really can’t say for anything else I saw in your closet when Harold died, and I certainly don’t want you wearing your funeral dress. Try these on. They’ll fit, unless you’ve lost more weight than you did between Cody and Harold.”)

  “Not much. I do eat.” Not meat anymore, but why make a point of that?

  “You have a nice shape, Louisa. You’ve always had a pretty figure. You don’t have to dress like you live in a barn.”

  “Well, I sort of do live—”

  “That’s not the point,” she interrupted. “Listen, you can wear either top with the skirt, but for God’s sake, don’t put a top over the dress. I wish you could send me a picture, and you could if you’d just kept Harold’s cell phone. Then I could make sure you look okay.”

  “I’m not trying to impress Gus. Of all people.”

  “Nothing wrong with seeing who else is there you might meet.”

  “Pfft. Not interested. Wearing my rings anyway.”

  “This revenge thing is fine, sister, and I’m all with you. It’s keeping you going. But we do need to think some about what happens after you get your revenge.”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll be just fine.”

  She sighed through the receiver. “Just try on the clothes when they come.”

  * * *

  The clothes came on Tuesday, just as she said they would, and I don’t feel good telling you this because possibly it will lower your opinion of me, but I lied to CarolSue and told her they were beautiful and I loved them, but really, I never opened the box. I don’t think I’ve ever outright lied to her before, as opposed to omitting information that might upset her, but I couldn’t make myself get dressed up in something new to go to dinner at a hunting lodge with Gus, something I’d never do except for The Plan. It just seemed sacrilegious.

  There was a time when I couldn’t have lied to CarolSue. She’s the only person who knows about The Plan at all, but part of me feels like the Lone Ranger without Tonto now that I’ve gone off on my own and revised The Plan to one she’d never approve. Or maybe Dale Evans without Roy Rogers. I loved both those cowgirls, especially Annie Oakley, when I was a kid. My parents got a tiny black-and-white TV when I was maybe six. We were one of the first families to get one, too. My dad was so proud. Meet the Press was his idea of a religious experience. He made us all sit close circled around the little screen and watch; our reward was that we also got to watch Milton Berle. Later, Mom used to watch Lassie and Rin Tin Tin with me, both of us hiding our eyes when the dogs were in danger. But I can’t think about all that’s gone now. I’ll just think about all the justice Annie Oakley saw to, and how she did it herself, no sidekick.

  So yes, I was wearing “that old blue thing,” which would have put CarolSue in a dead faint, when Gus’s tires crunched down the gravel of my driveway on Friday. We’d had quite a dry September so far, making for some early leaf fall in spite of the daytime heat. Twilight was coming earlier, and the cicadas were loud as an engine whining the earth toward darkness and winter, my hard, sad time.

  I had done the whole makeup job, the way CarolSue taught me—a touch of blue eye shadow, too—and put my hair up with the tendrils and soft bangs, also her flouri
shes. See, I’d done all that for Harold. Or CarolSue had, but either way, he’d seen me fixed up and taken great pleasure in it, too. How could I put on a beautiful new outfit for another man to see? CarolSue has such an eye for clothes: always fine, fashionable, flattering, and on sale. Before she moved away, she wouldn’t let me go shopping alone. I’d stay in the dressing room and she’d bring things in for me to model and her to say yes or no. I’d get a vote, but often she’d override it either way. Whatever she’d sent would make me look better than I wanted to, better than I am now.

  It didn’t end up mattering that I wore the old blue thing anyway. Gus acted like Marilyn Monroe had opened my front door when he knocked. “Miss Louisa, you’ll put all the other ladies to shame tonight,” he said. I almost felt guilty for a moment about The Plan because he was possibly sincere and men are so fragile, but then I reminded myself how he’d frustrated my Harold all the way to the grave and positioned myself just slightly sideways as I opened the door so my boobs and hip would be evident. The blue thing might be old but it’s not shapeless. After all, it was CarolSue who picked it out, even if it was ten years ago.

  “Bless your heart. Step in for a minute, Gus, while I get my purse. I’m ready.” Oh, was I ready. I have to admit Gus looked better out of his uniform. It had to be accidental that he smelled a bit like Harold, or maybe it was just that fresh-showered-man smell. He put his hand on the small of my back as he walked me out. I didn’t want to like it.

  The Lodge would be crowded, Gus warned on the way over. “Guys gearin’ up for the season, y’know. Some of ’em plain dangerous, but most are the real thing.”

  “I guess the laws are pretty strict,” I said, “or are they?”

  He glanced over at me in the passenger seat and I kept my face that of an innocent woman. “I can’t be everywhere,” he said finally.

  “You seem pretty good at it, though,” I said, and my tone lied it into a compliment. I smiled at him and looked ahead at the road. We were passing fields of yet-uncut cornstalks, tall and weathered to brown now. Here and there we’d pass a pasture where cattle were scattered, lips to good grass, not knowing their luck would run out. FRESH EGGS, $1.25 DOZEN, said a hand-lettered sign in the yard of a white frame house with a porch like mine. It took me into memories. Harold had made my sign. LOUISA’S EGGS FOR SALE, it said, which I always found very unfortunately worded, but he’d painted it so carefully I just didn’t have the heart to say anything. The sign was still somewhere in the barn, I was pretty sure. I’d not had the heart to get rid of one thing Harold had owned or made or given me.

  We were driving into a melon fire sunset. Gus dodged a pothole. The roads were no better there than around home. The terrain became more wooded and remote as we headed west, toward Seeley Crossing. “There’s a whitetail,” Gus said once into the silence, pointing, his hand shooting just past my face toward the window. “Just watch. Where there’s one, there’s at least one more, usually two. That’s a nice boy, that one. Look’t that rack. We don’t see many around here anymore.” He put on the brakes, and I saw the buck, ahead on my right, emerging from the undergrowth, which was yellowing from both recent drought and the season, though honeysuckle is always the last to lose its color or leaves.

  There weren’t others, though. The loner stood watching us. Wishing Gus had been going slowly enough that I could have seen his eyes, I looked over my shoulder as we passed him. Only then did he turn and walk as if unafraid back into the forest, to safety. That just doesn’t happen; deer don’t stand around casually to observe passing traffic. They have a natural and well-founded flight instinct. So I took it as a sign from Harold that I was doing the right thing. I realize that believing in good signs is ridiculous because there are bad signs everywhere that I ignore. I’ve always thought that believing in signs is plain delusional. Give me a working tornado siren over some mysterious bad sign any old day. But there I was “seeing” Harold give me the A-OK by appearing in the form of a deer. It made me look forward to that full bar we were headed to. But it was a nice, natural opening.

  “There are deer twice that size on my land.”

  “Really?!” Gus said. “No kidding?”

  I couldn’t decide if I should say more to him, but I didn’t want to overplay my hand and there was a road marker for the Lodge. It noted PRIVATE PROPERTY.

  Gus made a point of it, too. “It’s a private club,” he said, like it was a good thing, when we went in the door and I fanned the smoke odor away my face. “Didn’t have to change anything when they banned smoking in public places,” he said, and I thought he might be apologizing for a bad law. A good thing Harold didn’t belong. He’d have died twenty years sooner just from the secondary smoke at the dinners. I wondered how Gus afforded it, on his sheriff’s salary, which was public information, but CarolSue always says that what we don’t know about people is a whole lot more than what we do. Maybe he inherited some money and being sheriff was his hobby. I reminded myself to concentrate on The Plan and looked around.

  “Do all these people belong? It’s much . . . bigger than I thought.”

  “No. Lotta guys come as guests. You can be a guest four times a year. Gets the cheap ones out of paying dues.” He chuckled. “But we make money on ’em anyway, charge ’em almost double for drinks and dinner.”

  Red-faced men in sports coats with open-necked shirts and skirted women of almost every age were jammed in, holding plastic wineglasses, beer bottles, or swirling ice. The crowding was because there were tables set up for dinner all around the floor, which didn’t make for comfortable mingling. The bar was to the left on two long tables set side to side, and it looked to be self-serve but there was also a smiley blond woman behind it taking money.

  It took my eyes a bit to adjust to how the small windows cut the available light, and I was distracted by the smoke and people greeting Gus, Gus introducing me to people whose names I wouldn’t and didn’t care to remember. Then some shoulders parted and we were headed to the bar, Gus presuming I might like “a little white wine,” and me trying to figure out how to get a hefty straight bourbon, forget the tea tonight, when I realized that close behind the woman at the bar was a deer. A buck’s head. Mounted on the wall. No, two . . . three. More. When I looked around the room, wherever my view wasn’t blocked, another head stared out. I was surrounded by a herd. I felt sick, even a little light-headed. Oh my buck, my does, my yearlings in their day beds.

  “Where’s the ladies’ room?” The question was abrupt. I’d have to get control of myself.

  “Far back, over there, right side. There’s two. You go to the one by the doe.” He threw a football pass gesture over the crowd diagonally across the room. I looked up automatically; the top of antlers were visible above heads. “You can’t see it from here. Just head that way and it’s the door by the doe.”

  I didn’t move.

  “You all right, Louisa?”

  “Yes, of course. I’m just a little warm,” I said, thrashing through my purse for a tissue. I was sweating, and not only my face. Gus’s cheeks were red, but he was a beefy man and they always were. He’d not taken off his sports coat, and here I was, years past menopause and wanting to rip off my dress, anything for some air.

  “I’ll put some ice in that wine for you. How ’bout I wait for you by this end of the bar?”

  I remember thinking, There’s no way I can do this. But I made myself head toward that bathroom. It’s a good thing I kept reminding myself to focus on The Plan, focus on The Plan, because I made it three-quarters of the way, which seemed like five miles, saying excuse me, pardon me, just trying to get through here, excuse me, as faces turned and lit in succession as people laughed and made way. Until one male, his back to me, had a scrawny ponytail in a weak curl that went just over the coat collar. It was less him I recognized, though, than the platinum Barbie doll in spike heels next to him. They stood hip to hip, her arm tight around his waist, his circling her back and his hand holding her bare upper arm.

&nb
sp; You’re wondering what I thought, what I felt? I didn’t. Not then, not yet.

  Another woman approached the Barbie, her arms open to hug her. The Barbie moved to reciprocate and Larry took steps to make space, blocking me as he did so. He raised his eyes as he turned, brushing them over me like a dust cloth. There was no logical reason to panic, but I did. There I was, Lot’s wife, paralyzed, when I most needed to move quickly. He widened his stance and shifted his belt under his belly. For just a second I thought our eyes met, but his were vacant. I recognized the too-close features crowded into the center of his face, but now I could better see the color of his hair—yes, exactly what my mother used to call dirty dishwater—and how scalp showed through in some spots. His mouth looked like the mug shot, thin straight lips closed, under a scraggly mustache. The Barbie tapped his shoulder, trying to get his attention to meet her friend.

  I felt space close around me, like a lens slowly browning out the rest of the room and trapping me there alone with him, surrounded by a rushing white noise, Larry growing bigger and closer in front of me. I saw his Adam’s apple and thought it moved. That movement must have been what galvanized me, because somehow I didn’t faint or throw up. I averted my own eyes (as if I were the one who was guilty!) and forced my feet to move in a sideways dodge.

  I made it to the bathroom, locked the door, and put the lid of the toilet down. I put my head between my legs until the dizziness seemed better, then sat up and tried to breathe normally. Remember why you’re here, I said to myself. You can do this. He has no idea who you are. Stay focused. He’s the whole object of The Plan, and it’s so much the better that he is actually here in person. I stood, sat back down as another flush came, and stood again when it passed. I thought to wash my face, but that would take off my careful makeup job, and I hadn’t brought anything but lipstick and a compact in my purse. Then I thought of how my mother used to put a towel with cold water on the back of her neck. There were paper towels, so I wet one and put it there. It helped me pull myself together.