I did not fall. I’m lying down because I want to. It’s too hard to go into the house right now, to the pans of water on the radiators and the smells of cooking and the boys’ shouts.
Here come her dogs—Richard’s idea, knowing how she loves them, the big black poodles with warm tongues. She turns her face to the earth and shuts her eyes, puts her hands over her head while the dogs fumble over her, barking their alarm, their confusion, taking her fallen hat in their clicking teeth. Brother and sister, the dogs are, do they remember that? People are so certain of what animals know and don’t know. It makes her furious.
Finally, only the dogs and Richard remain with her. Iris probably waylaid the doctor to complain about her gallstones. There will be a bill on the hallway table, and Nelle is the one who will have to pay it, drawing from her Philadelphia bank. Richard may be strapped right now, as he is from time to time, but she has enough. Only Iris’s doctor bills make her feel poor, in a way that has nothing to do with the amount of the check she writes.
If Richard had imagination, he might bring the candelabra out here and a book, and read to her. She senses rather than sees his whippet figure. Ten times he has made her pregnant, and eight babies came. He does not beseech her; that is not his way. If she didn’t know him, she might find his silences attractive. He stands so casually beside her that an onlooker might think this was their habit, she on the grass and he nearby.
“Are you still satisfied with Stanton?” asks Richard after a time.
“He does fine,” she says.
Richard drags a stool from the stable, climbs upon it, and lights a cigar. She likes the smell. Ben smokes cigars too. The scent does not betray her.
“Well, Nelle,” Richard says.
Someone is draping a blanket over her—Stanton. She accepts it, a thick plaid one Richard keeps in the Model T. The sky darkens, the glorious deep blue draining away. From the stable comes a tiny red glow; she has instructed Stanton to use a red light in the pregnant mare’s stall to make the foal come sooner.
Stanton goes to the house, where he will eat in the kitchen with Edmonia and the others.
“Do you want a divorce?” Richard says.
“I do not.” She has loved Ben for five years. “All the children are yours.” She gives Richard that, because that would be too much for any man to wonder.
Only when it is fully dark does she turn toward Richard, but he is gone. She didn’t hear him leave. This is what she has been waiting for, being left alone. Tonight she’ll see the Milky Way stretching from the arborvitae trees in the garden all the way to the creek out back, miles of stars above her land. She will have the smells and sounds of night, spider webs and dew. When morning comes and she’s on the ground, she’ll feel her head so heavy, as if the braids and circlets of her hair are made of iron. She is the sun, which has set, all cold metal, cold and still.
She could become a camper and make expeditions to the Blue Ridge, packing up lanterns, portable stoves, and tin water bottles, going out alone. She imagines grandchildren and great-grands begging to go with her, but she won’t want them, won’t even take her dogs.
On the grass, she can put it all aside for a while: Richard and Ben; her sons, the house with its labyrinth of plumbing and wires, always going wrong. Already she hears the story that will be told about her. She lay outside all night, gone crazy from that affair. She’ll outlive them all—tale-tellers, prattlers. She’s weathervane and salt lick, creek and vine. She gave Ben a present today, a juniper-colored scarf that he looped around his neck, and for a while it was all he wore.
She hears Stanton’s returning footsteps, but he leaves her alone, entering the stable by the back door. The latch clicks shut. As soon as she sighs, stretches her legs, and flops out her arms beneath the blanket, she falls asleep.
She dreams of the rakes and scarecrows in her shed, the chickens in the coop and the goldfish in their pond, the horses with their blunt needs and complicated health, the ribbons and trophies in her glass case, the separate weather in her attic, its violent heat and secret winds, her sons’ wars and books and lengthening limbs, the married ones with their quarrels and disillusionment.
She sees knotholes beneath her feet, knotholes in the wood as she boards the ship that will take her out of India, with fever in her body and the captain overlooking the measles on her face, seeing only the furor of golden hair beneath her hat. All her life she has kept a journal, recording the dates that the daylilies bloom, the animals’ ailments and treatment. She used to write about parties and the men who pursued her. Yet there is little in her journals about Richard. She has reread the volumes from her early twenties, trying to understand how her marriage came to be, why she did not perceive his rigidity, his infuriating mildness. A thin cloth will smother you as well as a thick one. Richard’s eyes are river-gray; his eyes in photographs are those of his ancestors—you see right through them to the backs of their heads.
She smells coffee and wakes, with no transition from dream to sitting up. She guesses an hour has passed. It’s Stanton with a Thermos, and he’s saying there is whiskey in the coffee. He uncaps it and pours for her.
“How old are you?” she asks.
“Twenty-three.”
Same age as one of her boys. They think only of women and flying airplanes, her boys. “And how old when your father died?”
“I was twelve,” he says. “We’d just come here from Henrico County.”
She sips the coffee, part of her still boarding the ship in India, still winding the scarf around Ben’s neck. “You took lessons with my boys, didn’t you? From their Aunt Iris?”
“For a while,” Stanton says.
She could cry, and it would be all right. But she doesn’t. She could put out her hand, touch his arm, and begin with him, for she is still attractive. She pictures his room in the stable above them—almost bare, with only a cot and a washstand. That room, up in the loft, has the best view of the whole property, better than her own. To think he grew up there. Other than giving him books occasionally, she’d quit paying him any mind once his father had been cut down and buried and the boy given a place to sleep. A good egg, he is.
“Why did he do it?” she says. “Your father?”
She hands him the cup and he drinks, but he doesn’t answer.
“Terrible,” she says, clutching the blanket up to her chin.
No divorce. But I reserve the right to change my mind.
II
She wakes in the dark to find a small wild animal sniffing her cheek, close enough that she smells berries on its breath. When she reaches out to touch it, it dances away. This is something she could love. Moonlight picks out the dark intelligence in its eyes. The wiry fur is dense, shining with oil, a coat that sheds water and shelters young. Neither fox nor possum, the size of a large cat or a small dog, it flashes sharp teeth beneath a tight lip and fine whiskers.
How much of her life she has given to horses and dogs, and that is time well spent. That should be on her gravestone.
Come here. Let me get a better look at you.
From his window, Stanton sees the motion of Nelle’s arm, as if she would stroke the creature. While she slept, these last several hours, she has had visitors she will never know about: deer came by and an owl, and a comical, trundling skunk, and all inspected her, smelling the blanket and her hair.
Yesterday, men cut blocks of ice from the river, and tomorrow, there may be snow. Nelle needs lots of ice, year-round, for her household, for herself. Ice for her claret, ice for her tea, ice for her aching head. Stanton marvels at how much of everything is used and consumed in that house. Nelle sometimes brings him books, leaving them on the steps going up to his room, books about daylilies, calculus, India. On nights he can’t sleep, he reads the books by moonlight in the wide loft, which is half full of hay, and lets the vastness of the open space fill his heart. He knows he will never live in a more beautiful place.
Nelle’s hands graze the animal’s fur. Catlike, it a
pproaches, then bounds away, vanishing. Stanton has seen the creature once or twice before, but he can’t remember what it’s called. He fights the urge to scratch his arms and legs, where poison ivy has left sores. If he gives in to temptation and claws himself, the poison ivy will spread like slow fire. Even in winter, he is extraordinarily sensitive to the plant, never mind if it is dead.
Nelle’s choices, her actions, make perfect sense to him. In these last few weeks he has understood why she walks more and more slowly from stable to house, has felt in his own muscles the effort that her striving takes.
The burning itch on his ankle gets the better of him. He scratches freely, viciously, and is gratified to feel the prickling heat double, quadruple in size. In the morning, with blisters bubbling on his skin, he’ll be sorry.
She picked a good night. Moonlight washes over the fields, the yard, the driveway, the pastures, ending abruptly in a hall of darkness that marks the boxwood hedge, the entrance to the formal garden. Early flowers are already leafing out and blooming. Stanton has heard Nelle Fenton say their names: Italian arum, winter aconites, snowdrops, crocus. He falls asleep, as he often does, by imagining he is entering that dark garden and finding a different landscape than he knows it to be in daylight.
* * *
She wakes before sunrise, taking her time to sit up and stretch, retrieving the hat demolished by her dogs. Well, she’ll get another. She tosses it back on the ground. She is only a little stiff. Birds launch a dozen conversations in the bare lindens. Light, humid wind blows from the south, the kind of wind that’ll turn cold and bring snow by evening.
The practical thing would be to go inside and eat an early breakfast, bacon and waffles, but she doesn’t want that, not yet. She is not ready to cross her yard, but she needs somewhere to go. For some time she lies quietly, until an idea comes to her.
The schoolhouse. Tidy and warm, the little wooden schoolhouse clings to the riverbank, where some spinster teaches the children of the poorer farmers. Nelle won’t know any of the children, and that is fine. Dusting off her clothes, she rises and sets out. By the time she’s stacking kindling in the schoolhouse stove, the sun is up and students are arriving.
This is the school she has scorned for her own children, relying on Iris, who has finally shown herself to be a crooked stick. Last week, Iris went behind her back to tell Philip to prepare a ham, and not even in the proper way, with the cloves and sugar. Nelle will never forgive that; orders for the kitchen are her prerogative, not Iris’s. A crooked stick casts a crooked shadow. And Iris only pretends to know geography, can’t read a map to save her life. When Nelle has expressed all this to Richard, he has replied that his sister is an excellent teacher, and that she did nothing wrong in ordering a ham.
“Where’s Miss Baird?” the startled children ask.
“I am your teacher now,” she tells them. What a ragtag crew, all rickets and fleas, head lice and hand-me-downs, fifteen children, the youngest perhaps five and the oldest a boy about fourteen with taunts in his eyes. She’s ready for him, for all of them. When Miss Baird materializes, Nelle sends her away: “It’s time they started learning something.” Stunned, afraid to defy anyone so prominent as Nelle Fenton, Miss Baird frets about in the yard for a while, then drags herself away. Children crowd at the window, yowling for her, until Nelle whacks their bottoms with a ruler.
For three days, Nelle runs the school. She does not go home at night but sleeps instead on the floor. Stanton brings her food, coffee, and bedding, and sleeps outside the schoolhouse door. Richard stops by the first evening, but she sends him home: “It is not necessary for you or anybody to worry about me.”
“Answer me when I speak to you!” she tells the children. The tiniest reminds her of a blanched toad; the older ones are sallow and reedy. The oldest boy—whom does he remind her of?—has pinkeye. When he is slow to answer a question, she banishes him to the corner, where she leaves him for hours, until he slumps and falls down.
“Stand up!” she says, and he scrambles to his feet.
“He was there a long time, ma’am,” a voice peeps. Toad-girl, defending him.
The boy’s pink eyes are furious. “I don’t have to stay here,” he says and stomps away.
“Arithmetic,” Nelle commands, and she leads them through a frenzied hour of sums and subtraction. Next, the children must read aloud. “Have you never had elocution lessons?” she asks a mumbling girl.
She does not stop at midday. Harried through spelling and grammar, the children sneak glances at their lunch pails. Miss Baird always took a long time with her lunch, sighing and chatting as she ate, sharing popcorn balls and dried apples. Late in the day, when Nelle is ready, she lets them go suddenly, as if a spell is lifting. “You may leave,” and they break out of the schoolhouse as if it’s on fire.
Early on the fourth morning, a delegation of parents arrives, angry, awkward, rallied by Miss Baird. “How dare you reprove me,” Nelle says, “when I have been teaching your brats.”
The parents argue that Miss Baird needs to get back to work. It is her job, they say. Nelle informs the cringing teacher, “They can barely read.”
“You’re scaring them,” whines a woman who resembles the blanched toad-girl. “My daughter is afraid of you. If you want to teach, teach your own.”
Nelle has not taken off her riding habit in days. Bits of grass still decorate her hair. She abandons the schoolhouse not because of the contemptible parents, but because she has decided what to do next.
She walks directly to Ben Burleigh’s house, a distance of several miles, declining the offers of motorists who would give her a ride. There was rain the previous night, and the ditches are rich with slick weeds. Pockets of snow remain in shady places. Her riding habit gapes around her waist, as if she has eaten nothing the past several days, but in fact, Stanton brought picnics of roast lamb, ham biscuits, cole slaw, pears, and chocolate cake. She just doesn’t remember if she actually ate. How long since she walked this far? On horseback, it would be nothing. Before she got a car, she drove her buggy everywhere, fording the river, setting her jaw as she steered the horses. She loved that, the fording, the water cold and brown around the wheels of the buggy.
She has never been to Ben’s house before, but she knows where it is. Though he associates with the landed people, he is only a small farmer. The hunting cabin where they meet, in the woods, is not this house, where he lives with his family. This house needs paint, and the roof is missing shingles. Frostbitten azalea bushes line the front walkway. Behind the house, the yard slopes steeply to the river. Ben is Master of Hounds, but he has only a few dogs himself, and these, in their pen, bark at her approach.
Ben must have seen her coming. He opens the door before she can knock, and lets her in. She expects his wife and children to be home; she planned to ask if she might have a private word with him. But that won’t be necessary, for as far as she can tell, he is alone in the house. Through a window she sees a woman who must be his wife, along with several children, out in that steep, plunging backyard. They’re chasing each other, their yelps muffled by distance.
Ben has his hunt face on, tight around the eyes, nostrils flared. This is formal, her visit. They do not touch. His hunt face startles her, as if her presence requires the marshaling of all his senses, a mental mapping-out of hounds and dogs and riders. Well, of course she requires this. He is better-looking than his station in life would call for, and probably a few years younger than she. Where is the spruce-colored scarf? She could tear through the house in search of it, and there would be nothing he could do.
Ben has not shaved today. She’ll remember that and the tang of spruce or juniper in the house, as if the green scarf has delivered the scent of the woods. A heart-shaped box of Valentine bonbons occupies the hallway table. Ben wears his hunt face even as he offers her the chocolates and she declines; after all, he must have given them to his wife, she of the muted hilarity in the yard. He puts a piece of candy in his mouth and waits.
In the time it takes for Nelle to say what she has come to say, and for Ben to answer, a striped cat lying on the rug bathes its face with its paws, and a clock chimes laboriously. For a moment their voices fill the room, overlapping and sudden. Then silence. She has asked him to run away with her, and he has refused. He swallows the last of his chocolate in what must be a dry mouth.
At Nelle’s feet, the cat yawns so wide that the tips of its ears meet.
She moves past Ben and goes through the cluttered, sour-smelling kitchen, where sandwiches are half-made on a table. She pushes open the back door and steps outside.
Ben’s wife—Sylvia, Nelle thinks her name is—is much younger than Ben. Nelle has never had a good look at her before. Apart from a jutting chin, she is almost pretty, with loose, abundant hair. She’s spinning in a circle with her children, all holding hands. Well, surprise, there is the pinkeye boy. Nelle has never asked Ben anything about his children, nor did she ask any of her students their names. Nelle counts the children. So these four—a half-grown son, two small girls, and baby boy—are Ben’s.
“Want to play?” one of the little ones yells.
Nelle shakes her head. Ben’s wife nods to her. Nelle sits down on the back step, watching them whirl and play. The river appears deep here and dangerous, and don’t they know they could roll down the hill and into the water? She had not known there were views like this in Rapidan, that the river was ever this wide. In her numbness, she is lazily fascinated by all of it.
A fenced pasture close to the house holds three horses, one of which is biting the rails. Ben, who has a genius for orchestrating a hunt as a composer might create a great symphony, doesn’t know how to manage his own animals.
Sylvia Burleigh and her children are laughing. The pinkeye boy darts a glance at Nelle, then pretends not to notice her. It is not in his interest to reveal that he knows her. A light rain falls, and Sylvia and her children collapse on top of each other, shouting. The surface of the river looks gravelly, foamy from the rain. And here come the dogs, Ben’s hounds. He must have let them out. They bound upon the shrieking children.
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