The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “I guess I thought they deserved it” came through the splashing.

  “More than you did?” I licked the thread and pushed it through the needle’s eye.

  “I didn’t throw anything.”

  “But you watched them do it. You went along.” Whipping stitches along the rent, holding the fabric taut so it wouldn’t pucker.

  “But I didn’t throw any. Even though they told me to.”

  “You think that makes you better. Because you only watched, and didn’t throw.” The squeak of the pump again and more splashing while I stitched back the other way, making a row of neat Xs. “They were pretty angry at you.”

  “They peed in my bed that night.” A shrug in his voice: he accepted the boy justice that had been dealt out.

  I took the scissors from the basket and clipped off the end of the thread close to the knot, then turned the trousers right side out again.

  “Done,” I said, and held them up. A small damp hand came over my shoulder and snatched them away.

  The mended place didn’t even show when he’d dressed.

  “Thank you,” he said. His face was shiny and red in places from the rough towel.

  “Well, go on,” I told him, getting up from the stool. “I have to put things away before the rain comes.”

  “How do you know it’s going to rain?” he asked.

  “I just know.” I poured the basin out onto the grass, collected up the towel and soap. He stood and watched me. I went to the house, climbed the two steps up to the front porch, turned around. He was still there. “What?” I said.

  “Some of the boys say you’re a witch.”

  “I know.” He jerked his eyes up to mine, and I laughed at his look of surprise. “There are boys who called me that who are men now.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “No.”

  “But you’re not a normal lady either.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  He fingered the mended place on his trousers, flexing his knee back and forth.

  “I did burn the sheet on purpose,” he whispered.

  “All right,” I said.

  He appeared taken aback. He’d probably expected a scolding—for the act, or for the earlier lie.

  “I hate the press,” he said. “It steams big hot clouds up in your face.” He sighed. “I’ll have to confess it.”

  “Why?”

  “So God knows,” he said, clearly a little shocked that I didn’t understand this.

  “Shouldn’t God know already?” He looked thoughtful. “And anyway, to my mind pulling dandelions out of dry ground on a hot day is penance enough for just about anything.”

  That’s when he smiled. I hadn’t realized until that moment that he hadn’t smiled once during the whole afternoon.

  “I’m Leo,” he said.

  “You can call me Clare.”

  “Not Missus something?” he asked.

  “Just Clare.”

  “Clare. I’ll come back.”

  He waited, through a long uncertain moment.

  “All right,” I said.

  “When I get thrown out of Folding.” That smile again. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  * * *

  IN THE DAYS after Leo’s visit, I felt an agitation, like a person with an event on a mental calendar—a feeling of something to do. I had plenty to do, of course. I always did in summer, but all of it was so familiar by then, my body moving through the motions without thought, that it was easy for my mind to slide away from my physical activity and reveal the waiting underneath.

  I found that deeply annoying. Waiting? Waiting for what? For a scrawny, naughty child who was no relation to me and no concern of mine? Who talked endlessly and who clearly had discipline problems. A child nobody wanted.

  It had been nearly two decades since I had had regular contact with anyone. Three-quarters of the year I was servant to my garden, which provided me with much of my food. I kept chickens for eggs; I got dairy and sometimes meat from James, the taciturn farmer next door, in exchange for jams and pickles and pies. His wife, I gathered, wasn’t much of a cook. Staples, like soap and salt, sugar and flour, I got from town. I visited there every couple of weeks during good weather, traveling on foot and carrying little; I had the heavy items delivered, whenever it was convenient, by James when he visited town in his truck. I’d go weeks without speaking more than a sentence to anyone.

  I had fit my life to the seasons, and lived without company or surprise. Spring brought torrents of rain, beating harmlessly on my roof and turning the garden to mud while I started my seeds in pots indoors. The waters’ retreat ushered in the long, busy time of planting and weeding, harvesting and canning, clipping and mowing and edging, which lasted throughout the rest of spring and summer. Autumn brought late harvest, leaf burning, preparing the garden for frost. Harsh winds scoured the hill in winter even when the daytime temperature was not severe; usually there’d be a spell of deep cold in February, and a blizzard or two to snow me in. Hard to imagine some days that spring would ever come again, but it always did, everything starting over. Apart from a few early miscalculations, when I hadn’t preserved enough to carry me through the winter and the thaw found me eating pickles for breakfast, I had done well. I’d hammered out a self-sufficiency in the little stone house on the hill. If I did ever long for human companionship, there was no time to dwell on it. My body kept busy and I slept well without dreaming. How could one small boy change all that in an afternoon?

  I slashed at the Grady family plot, and later in the garden my impatient fingers left bruises on the tomatoes. I couldn’t stop the wondering that ran along underneath everything: Had Leo been reprimanded for sneaking away, for coming back in a wet uniform? And what was he doing now—was he praying, or eating, sitting in a classroom, being punished? Was he thinking right this minute about stealing back here? Was he perhaps walking up to the cemetery wall right now? I’d hold off as long as I could, then turn . . . and see no one.

  After a week, it seemed clear that he wasn’t coming back, and I had to accept that unlikely as it seemed, he must be doing well in Folding after all.

  * * *

  I WAS RAISED to believe that God holds each of us in His hand, and makes all the choices according to His divine plan. Now I believe that even if God provides the choices, we make our own destinies, even when we don’t know we’re doing it. Every choice we make carries us along toward our fate: one act, one moment, can swivel a life right around. But I wasn’t thinking any of that on that late summer day sixty years ago, a week and a half after Leo’s visit. I was engaged in the simplest, the most ordinary and womanly of tasks: I was looking for something to wear.

  Over the years, I’d abandoned any pretense at femininity. The wardrobe in the cottage bedroom held two pairs of overalls and three blouses that would more honestly be called shirts. In a trunk scattered with mothballs were a couple of roughly knitted sweaters and a single dress. I lifted out the dress and shook it by its shoulders. My Second Best Dress. I hadn’t worn it since the day I’d come to Roscommon. Despite the mothballs, the bruise-colored fabric was peppered with tiny holes. I held it up against myself. I was stringier now, but I could take it in with a quick basting and mend the larger holes. No time to air out the mothball smell.

  An hour or so later, I walked down the long path toward the cemetery, past the garden with its beckoning weeds, feeling the tickling of the wind on my legs. It felt indecent, almost as if I were naked; I had gotten used to the weight and coverage of overalls. Through the cemetery, passing the Brennan plot, the Cahills and the Flynns. I opened the far gate and stepped through into the no-man’s-land between Roscommon and St. William’s Wood. The turf was springy underfoot, the air cooler under the roof of branches, a good ten minutes of brisk walking before I broke back out of woods and into the sunlight. All the while feeling that strange absence around my legs, kicking the skirt out with each step to feel the cloth and dispel the alarming sensation of nudity.

>   In the distance to my left, I could see a long green line of vegetation, the tight points of cornstalks working their way toward the sky. Beyond them were the pastures and fields and outbuildings, and the giant structure that contained the laundry works. I passed the springhouse where the path curved. In front of me was the dark-gray priory building with its peaked doorway, looking exactly as it had the last time I had seen it.

  Even then, I could have unmade the pattern of what was happening. I could have turned around. Even after I was up the path and lifting the door knocker, I still could have eased the knocker soundlessly against its brass rest and gone back through the woods to Roscommon. There was nothing to stop me from doing that. But I brought the knocker down with a loud sound, not once, but twice. I heard the boom of it in the hall within.

  One of the brothers answered, his eyebrows climbing toward his hairline at the sight of me. I held one arm awkwardly against my side to cover a cluster of moth holes at the waistline and asked for the prior. The man glided away without a word, closing the door in my face, leaving me alone with the sounds of the wind and a distant booming noise from the laundry, the lowing and bleating of livestock.

  When the door opened again, it revealed another stranger.

  “I’m here to see the prior,” I said.

  “I am the prior.” This man was younger by decades than Prior Washburn. His robe embraced his stout form closely, hanging shorter in the front because of his belly, and he had a long, fleshy face, like a satisfied horse.

  “I mean Prior Washburn.” Could a monastery have two priors?

  “Prior Washburn passed on in the spring. I’m the new prior. Charles.”

  “But I just—I just saw him.” It had actually been months, I realized. He’d come to Roscommon for a visit; we’d had tea and he’d spoken of the frenzy of lambing. “In April.”

  “He was already ill then. Although no one knew it.”

  He’d brought up topics long put to rest between us. Hasn’t it been enough, Clare? Isn’t there anyone missing you? I’d been annoyed and short with him. Not anyone that matters, I’d said. Everyone matters, he’d said in his gentle way. Had he been trying to tidy things up before he passed?

  “He was very kind to me.” Shame at the memory of my ingratitude. I realized that Prior Charles was waiting. “I’m sorry; I haven’t even introduced myself.”

  “We’ve met,” he said, smiling. “The first bad winter after you came. That terrible blizzard.”

  I remembered the blizzard well. My second winter at Roscommon. I had had to shovel every few hours during the worst of it, to prevent the snow drifting against the door and windows of the cottage and sealing me in. It had been a strange time, sleeping in snatches, going out into a white world in my never-quite-dry clothing. A world filled with the noise of the wind and of my breath, made loud by the scarf around my head.

  “We thought you might have run out of food or firewood,” he said. “Or that the snow had bound you in.”

  Yes, there was a monk who’d come that winter. He’d knocked at my door; I hadn’t heard him over the wind. It was not until I happened to pass the window and saw his thin, anxious countenance pressed up against the glass, startling me, that I had known he was there. Looking now, I could see that same young man in the older one before me.

  “It took me a good hour getting through the drifts,” he said, “and I didn’t know what I’d find at journey’s end. I expected the worst. But then you opened the door and—well.” He made a dry sound of laughter, apparently remembering the cozy scene that had greeted him: soup in the big iron pot, the crackling fire in the hearth. “Prior Washburn said he knew we didn’t have to worry about you after that.”

  I’d fed him a bowl of soup, I recalled, his fingers almost too frozen to hold the spoon. He’d stayed just long enough to thaw out, and then he was gone, declining my offer of a makeshift bed by the fire with something like terror. I would never have expected that stammering lad to grow into this confident cleric, the years fattening his speech as well as his body.

  “It was kind of you to come that time,” I said.

  “Prior Washburn asked me to.” Of course. I felt another stab of sorrow.

  “Where was he buried?”

  “He went to Swan Point,” he said.

  Naturally he’d have gone to the new cemetery. Only a hundred years old, it was nonsectarian, but many prominent New Englanders were interred there. I couldn’t have expected loyalty to Roscommon to withstand the beckoning prestige of Swan Point.

  “I should have come to tell you when he passed on,” said Prior Charles. “I’m very sorry. It’s just—” He lifted his hands, as if to say: we forget about you over there. How could I take offense? That had been my whole intention, after all. “What brings you here today?”

  “I thought you might be able to spare a boy.” I just blurted it out like that, still thinking about Prior Washburn. Not at all the way I had planned.

  His face recorded confusion, and a hint of alarm. Too late, I realized how it had sounded: as though I wanted a little meat for some stew, or was planning a human sacrifice.

  “I mean—” I thought back to what I’d prepared to say. “I have need of some help at Roscommon. Keeping the cemetery and the garden.”

  “It’s a big job,” he agreed.

  “It hasn’t been a problem before. But this summer’s been so dry—a lot of water hauling. I was thinking—”

  “It must get lonely there,” he mused, on his own conversational tangent. “Such a lot of work. I don’t know how you’ve managed it this long. Maybe a young man would be better able to handle it. Perhaps a couple, husband and wife.”

  “There’s no room there for a family,” I said after a shocked moment. I hadn’t expected this. “There’s hardly room for me.” Perhaps I should beat a hasty retreat before this conversation went much further. Get back to Roscommon and be forgotten again.

  “That land belongs to St. Will’s,” said Prior Charles. “We can reassign it at any time.”

  “But—I had an agreement with Prior Washburn. Rest his soul.”

  “Rest his soul,” he echoed. “You know he didn’t expect you to stay so long. We could find you a little house in town. With a garden. You could make those cakes year-round; Mrs. Massey would be happy to sell as many as you give her. It could make you a tidy living.”

  “I’m not ready to leave Roscommon,” I said. His expression hardened at my tone. I took a breath, and with effort made my voice meek. “It must have been a nice Mass for Prior Washburn,” I said. “I suppose there was a large attendance.”

  “There was.” Apology crept into his voice; he hadn’t thought to invite me.

  I let the silence spin out.

  Looking back on it now, I can see the humor in the situation: me so obvious and clumsy, so out of practice at manipulating men; him bewildered, so unused to being manipulated. I had been alone too long, and he had not been among women.

  He gave a heavy sigh. “All right. I don’t intend to break Prior Washburn’s promise. If you think you can manage over there—”

  “Oh I can, I can.” Then added, “with just a little help.”

  “Some of the older boys are good workers.” He pondered for a moment. “I suppose Gregory might do, he’s strong, and once lived on a farm.”

  Gregory wouldn’t do at all.

  “I was thinking.” I cleared my throat. “I met a boy on one of my mushroom walks.” Hoping this monk didn’t know anything about mushrooms, for it had been far too dry for fungus this year. “I thought maybe—”

  “The boys don’t go into the woods unsupervised.” Fat lot you know, I thought. “What did he look like?”

  I pretended to consider. “Brown hair. Pale. Short. He told me he was eleven.” What else could I tell him, to make him think of Leo? “He asked a lot of questions.”

  “That would be Leo,” said the prior immediately. “I don’t think he would be a good choice.”

  “Why not?
He seemed energetic enough.”

  “He’s undisciplined,” he said. “We’ve already tried him at outside work; that was a dismal failure. We put him in the laundry; another catastrophe. He doesn’t follow instructions. Always has his own ideas.” As if ideas were a bad thing. “I think Gregory would be better. He’s a bit slow, but tractable. He’ll be ready to hire on to a farm in a year or two.”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re set on Leo.” With real curiosity, he added, “Why?”

  That was the question, wasn’t it. I couldn’t think of any answer but the truth.

  “I like him.”

  “You like him,” he repeated as if nothing I could have said would have surprised him more.

  Perhaps that was actually the moment when my life turned, once again, on its hidden fulcrum. Through the open door behind the prior the gong of a case clock struck the hour.

  “He’ll never make a farmer,” warned Prior Charles.

  “No.”

  “He needs discipline.”

  “I can provide that.”

  “He’s too clever for his own good. But I suppose you’ll find that out for yourself.” I nodded, not quite believing that the thing had been settled. “You’ll keep an eye on him.” A final admonition. “He tends to wander.”

  “Yes,” I said, a single breath.

  We agreed that Leo would come to Roscommon the next Monday. Prior Charles stepped back and closed the door, and I retreated down the path toward the trees and the cemetery beyond them, eager to take the dress off and fold it back into its slumber in the trunk.

  * * *

  WHEN LEO CAME to the cemetery the next week I almost didn’t recognize him. I was weeding around the rosebushes at one end of the wall as he vaulted over the other end.

  “What on earth happened to your hair?” I said.

  “Lice.” When I shrank back he added, “Not me. One of the other boys. They shaved us all though.”