“We’re talking oil and water. Time ain’t nothing to a hog.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“This city slicker stops to ask directions from a farmer, see? And he’s standing by an apple tree, holding a hog in his arms. The hog is eating apples from the lower branches. So the stranger says, ‘Why’d you do it that way?’ and the farmer says, ‘Why not?’ ‘Why don’t you shake the apples down and let him eat off the ground?’ ‘The apples would get bruised like that. He likes them off the tree.’ ‘But it would save you energy,’ the stranger says, ‘and time.’ ‘Well,’ the farmer answers—I got this from a farmer, the one who works my mother’s place. He scratches his chin, considering. He squints up at the sky. ‘Time ain’t nothing to a hog.’ ”
“You’re telling me to go,” she says. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
XII
“I rise at 4 a.m. and help the Natives weed their Patch. Juan Alonso is grim this season, since he says we’re overdue for rain. I tell him trust in the Lord and be Certain of bounty but I confess to you, brother, that with every day and week of Drought I wonder whether Bounty is a term applicable to heathen land and think more longingly than ever of our own Green Hills. I recollect so well the contours of home. In the blinding noonday sun here sometimes I seem to see corn in abundance, the cows in ample pasturage, the limpid streams that feed the Bottom land and there where the river incessantly flows, where we kept our rowboats, the picnick place beyond the willows. It is a vision afforded to few. Here the cattle—what few we control—graze on hillsides so steep as to rival a Cliff, and the rivulets are dry. Vermont is earthly Paradise; believe you me who am at Great remove.
“Then I chastise myself for weakness, and would not confide such faithlessness to Willard for the world. We lack for nothing in these parts because the Lord is with us and His bounty is all-plentiful even without grain. I write you therefore secretly, and because I must needs share with someone these my secret Doubts. The boy I wrote of—Jo—has reverted. He speaks no more when preparing our fire; his mumble and chatter is mute.”
In the second winter of their marriage, she and Judah snowshoed down to the Walloomsac. The afternoon had had that brilliant clarity she knew the presage of a cold snap, bringing minus ten at best and maybe minus thirty. They had watched the sun go down and moon come up in tandem, and Maggie turned to him and said, “What would you say if we spent the night here; could we manage it?”
He answered yes, with luck, with matches and a bunch of scrap wood to burn and saplings for a lean-to, but it wouldn’t be much fun. She said, “Let’s do it,” and he said, “You’re crazy.”
“Maybe,” Maggie said. “Let’s try.”
So he humored her and gathered wood and said you break it up in sections and strip those pine branches there. Judah had his pocketknife and fire-starter and matches, but they had no hatchet. They settled on a space protected by a stand of pine, under the lee of the hill. There were six inches of crusty snow, but the spot was level. He cast wide circles, using the last light and saying he could use the light of the fire to find nearby deadwood later. Starting in the pine lot, she gathered a head-high pile of deadwood, warming to the work. Judah took off his snowshoes and stamped the branches with his boots, splintering them into usable lengths. He showed Maggie how to lash them, and she built a windbreak. “You sure you mean to do this?” Judah asked. “It’s not turned cold yet. Not even halfway there.”
“Will we survive it?” she asked.
“What time is it?” She had had the watch.
“Four forty.”
“We’ll know in twelve hours,” he said. “They won’t be a whole lot of fun.”
“Not if you take that attitude. If you don’t want us to try.”
So Judah had been challenged and was grim. “What if trying doesn’t work?”
“We’ll walk on home.”
“Not easy.”
“Oh, someone will come out and find us.”
The dusk was blue. She wondered, when would her teeth start to chatter.
“I feel called upon to ask this,” Judah said. “I’ve been in cold weather before.”
“How bad?”
“This bad and worse.”
“Well, you survived it,” she said. “My frosty hero. Right?”
“But I had sleeping bags. And a tent.”
“Will we die?” She dropped her head to look at him. He stood a full head higher, and it was a trick of flirtation; it made her look up through her lashes.
“Not likely. But there’s frostbite. You might lose a finger or two.”
“There’d be eight left.” She waggled her hands.
“Toes,” he said. “How good are those boots?”
“You gave them to me for Christmas,” Maggie said. “They’d better be good.”
“They are,” he adjudged them, remembering.
Then time slowed. Then he ceased to ask the time of her, and the night sky had no meaning, and she watched the constellations not knowing which quarter she watched. Wind rose and died, and she registered its arousal and subsiding. They had a flame in front of them, and a lean-to that sufficed. There were raccoon and rabbit and deer tracks and one two-footed track he couldn’t name. It appeared to snow, but the constellations were manifest, and therefore she knew it the wind, not sky, that had produced the snow. She pondered the distinction between the wind and sky. She remembered pictures of the wind with bellows as puffed cheeks, with its white hair streaming and a gunnysack. Wind was a god toting trouble, and forced to let it loose.
“Eight o’clock,” Judah said.
“Yes. Eight o’clock and all’s well.”
You take, she knew, a stitch in time. Flexing her fingers, Maggie wondered how you best stitch time, and what kind of needle it took. Judah, kneeling, seeming legless in the snow, was a furry creature she would have her children by. There were bears. He would take his leave of her when there was insufficient meat, and wander off outside and lie down uncomplainingly on the pack ice. The old and the infirm were luxuries, he said. Respect for age and infirmity was a mark of abundance, not strength. Those tribes that could afford to honor their elders were the best tribes to attack. They would be easy prey in the lean winters, he said, clustered to the fireside like flies in wet spilled sugar. There were rock abutments. In the hollow of the rock he hollowed still more deeply, and made a place to drink. There had been owls. She listened to them. She observed, for the first time, how alike are the cries of owls to those of railroad engines. She said this to her kneeling husband, but he was oblivious; there had been ice on his eyes. She wanted, obscurely, to wipe her own eyes. Kneeling beside him, Maggie attempted to wipe off the ice, but her gloves were thick and stiff and snow-encrusted also. Therefore she smudged his face further, attempting to cleanse it, and he blinked at her and whispered it was eleven o’clock.
“Time flies,” he said.
“No.”
“Maybe we should move around.”
“Yes. What’s absolute zero?”
“The temperature when nothing moves.”
“And how cold is it?” Maggie asked.
“I don’t know. It’s difficult to know yet. Maybe five below.”
“No. Absolute zero.”
His cheeks seemed splotched with measles, his forehead had been charred. “Not sure of that one either,” Judah said. “They can’t ever reach it.”
“Why not?”
“Because the thermometer moves. Because it’s absolute.”
“There are no absolutes”—she tried the joke—“absolutely not.”
“Two hundred seventy-three degrees below zero, I think. Centigrade.”
“This is cold enough also.” She clapped her hands. There was snowfall from her wrists. She watched his lips. They moved in opposition to his chin. They were not malleable anymore, and if he touched his knife to his lip’s flesh the knife blade would adhere. He spoke of men who gutted bear, then slept within the fur and fat a
nd ligaments. They used the paws for gloves. They coated themselves with flesh grease. The two of them had bear-paw snowshoes not five feet away. These tilted against the hill’s angle and were rimmed by snow already. Maggie looked for falling snow. She raised and lowered her head. The wind abated, and therefore she distinguished falling snow from snow that had fallen already and was dropping from the laden branch. There was no falling snow. She looked for the snowshoes again.
Heat hurt. The side of her that faced the flame was warm. Judah bought her a rotisserie, since she wanted one for Christmas. There where her world was in shadow, there on the dark eastern edge she could not feel, there was no tingling quickness in her arm. She turned. She thawed herself. One fourteen, he told her, and said we should keep on walking or decide. The fire spat pitch, and the green branches seemed like filaments of sap. They embraced. They fitted together. She was grateful for the duck down in her coat. He clasped her with his bulbous, shrouded arms. The firelight was yellow. She was without sensation. He rearranged their legs.
In this fashion they weathered the night; it was not as long or cold as Maggie had feared. She could layer the sky, but not wind. Wind was a wrestling match in progress, all over itself, arms and legs. You couldn’t tell the cold wind from the warm, but the night was windless and the two of them did sleep. She woke to guttered coals. She could not see the moon. There was light enough to see. Judah lay snow-marbled, but she knew her husband breathed because his breath was air. His nose was alabaster and his hair had been blasted, then chiseled, then rubbed. She wondered, should she light the fire, and decided no. It was warmer where she lay than when she stood. She flapped her arms and stretched and attempted jumping jacks. Her left leg hurt where she had lain on it; she waited for pain; she stamped her feet and saw and listened to them move.
“The heat is extreme here these months, though dry. Indeed one would wish there were moisture, that the parched land might drink. At eleven a.m. we cannot support it and lie in the hammocks in Shade; it is that hour now. Willard lies in the hut while I pen these lines to you, dear brother, in the fervent hope you read. Amongst the people here He shines like a beacon, but dimmed. When down the terraced hillside I see some weary husbandman, his short-legged stride always—or so it seems to me—an attempt to remain Upright on the mountain, or pigs snouting in the wallow that is behind each hut, wherever earth retains a sufficiency of moisture so that it become muddy with trampling, then do I measure His arrangements with Wonder, Who watcheth over all. The clean and the unclean are both within His purview, those who build enclosures and the Beasts enclosed.
“This day I am barely able to write. I wanted to tell you one thing. When Willard’s stay is over and he wakes from this long Sleep, we will return to the Green Mountains gratefully indeed. I dream of our father’s House. The shutters fasten and the door bolts fast and there is privacy abounding in the upstairs corridor, no shameful doings open to the world. If you saw what I had seen. We live in a barnyard here, among the Tribes.”
The people in this town, she thinks, set too much stock by face. A facing cord was half the wood you used to call a proper cord; farmers’ barns are painted on the street side only, if they need to save on paint. There are houses with dirt floors and no plumbing that nonetheless have imposing façades; why paint the portico, she wonders, if you require a floor? Her sister-in-law puts stock in “face,” and always asks, with that sideways slant to her mouth that means gossip, “What can you tell me that’s new and different?” Although they don’t discuss the child, she knows—by the way that Hattie sniffs and arches her eyebrows and harps on the Ferguson girl’s pregnancy—that Hattie knows. And therefore it’s a toss-up if the town does too.
Judah, when she met him first, was thirty-eight years old. Then ten years intervened, and she met and married him when he was forty-eight and she was twenty-three. So she is older now than he had been, who seemed old to her when she was truly young. She finds a cardboard carton full of letters that she sent. Telegrams and postcards proclaim eternal love. There is her carefully copied version of the Shakespeare sonnet that begins, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds . . .”
She cannot bring herself to read the letters through. They are stacked at random in the box; Judah had been retentive but careless, jumbling the years. The passionate phrases she does read (in her open penmanship, the Papermate unfaded) make her want to weep. They are so certain (she was so certain; she’s uncertain now how all this altered) things would work out well. They promise to carry his child. They say how wonderful his arms and nose and teeth and hair feel to the touch. They reek of musty innocence, and she finds it hard to recognize the print. “I’ll love you forever and ever,” she wrote. “Oh, J. P. Sherbrooke, wait and see.”
Yet see means hearing Hattie tell how Nathaniel Shotter preached this morning on the subject of lice in civilized lands, and how licentiousness was Christ’s true text when he urged the Magdalen to put off the ways of the flesh. As far as Hattie is concerned, the only true license is marriage, and those who are licentious without it are the cattle of this earth. Why else does darkest Africa remain in such a shadow; what else keeps all those Indians from improving their God-given lot? It’s not an accident, the preacher says, that Our Lord refused the ministry to women—though his attitude toward women, taken within the context of the time, was progressive and positive and kind. There is an ancient Latin proverb that is appropriate here: “Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi.” Hattie says the minister says that, in free translation, the proverb means, “What’s feasible for Jove is not permitted to the cow.” She repeats this to Maggie in various ways. “What’s good for the goose is sauce for the gander,” she says. “What is licensed by God is licentiousness in beef.”
See means watching from her window while a picnic progresses beneath her, on the lawn behind the Toy House where the elms afford protection. The blue-haired ladies, Hattie’s peers, wear cloth coats and keep them buttoned. Their laughter and chatter and gossip assault her as she spies; they are plumper, each of them than she in her sixth month. Wait means accept how they guzzle that cucumber salad and cider and pie.
Her retreat is a long, slow season; she tries to give up cigarettes and fails. Cleaning, Maggie forces her body through paces that were painless once; she has too many aches now to name. Therefore she mourns her youth. She exercises every day, but her whole system complains. And the sense of beauty fled, of all her agility winnowed away, is with her like a bulbous shadow every step she takes. The letters that she used to read—attempting to establish kinship, poring over Anne-Maria’s pleas in the faith that they presaged her own—ring hollow now, or false. She remembers a woodcut she studied once, of a spotted cat biting its tail. There is no starting point or end point to the cat; it swallows itself, and its tongue is serpentine, a second girdling chain. She believes herself that beast these weeks, and is her own extinction as she grows.
So see and if and wait become her litany; she chants them to the waning moon, then to the crescent and full. She tries to teach herself the shapes of stars again, and when the constellations would appear. Now all she knows are the Dippers, and they tilt and careen past her room.
She calls her doctor. “How is it going?” he asks.
“All right.”
“Okay. What are you feeling?”
“It kicks,” she says. “I’m not nauseated anymore.”
“Do you sleep?”
“Yes. Not all that well.”
“Any pain? Any particular problem you notice?”
“No. But . . .”
There is static on the line. She remembers when even the Big House phone had been a party line, how she always had the feeling that the operators and the neighbors listened in. Now the right to privacy is guaranteed, they say; now operators cannot listen in, even if she asks for verification; we’re not allowed to verify, they tell her—it takes a court order for that.
“But what?” he asks.
“Is it possible it’s twins?”
<
br /> “Except we did the sonogram.”
“Yes.”
“I might be wrong. There’s always a margin of error, okay. But I should call it unlikely, Mrs. Sherbrooke, you’re producing twins.”
She lights a cigarette. She knows that, she wants to tell him; it’s not what she started to ask. What she wanted to know and to hear him assert is whether it’s certain she’s having a child, or whether they’ve somehow been fooled. Because this makes no sense, pleads Maggie; it’s out of synch, it’s a jumbled-up time. She feels herself a creature and receptacle of other people’s expectations, not her own. Love is a word she’s used so often in those letters to Judah that it has been used up.
She shifts the phone. “Thank you.”
“You’re quite welcome.” His voice is high. “Is there anything else?”
“No.”
“Quite certain?” he inquires.
“Yes.”
“You are coming to see me”—she hears him rustle papers—“next Wednesday, remember.”
“I remember,” Maggie says. “Good-bye.”
But she cannot remember next Wednesday; she barely remembers last Wednesday. You cannot remember the jumble of time yet to come. In the future someone else will empty out the contents of that cardboard box, will know how a girl who signed herself Megan, then Meg, then Maggie wrote impassioned letters to a man as dead as she. Love lives, she had written; our love cannot die; love always and always, my love. To that future someone Megan too will seem a wasteful stranger: I love you love you love you, she had written, till the twelfth of never; love you deeper than the deepest ocean, taller than the tallest mountain, I’ll love until language runs dry.
Now Maggie adjudges herself. She presses her eyes shut and sees what she saw in photograph albums and magazines and men’s eyes. She sees herself on horses and in concert halls, or with her father on the dock in Wellfleet at high tide. She sees herself dancing, or in the Balmain gown she’d bought last year in defiance of the winter in Vermont. She sees herself mending fences with Judah to keep her Morgan in, leaning so hard on the wire it feels she too must stretch. She sees herself holding Seth. When he died of crib death something inside of her withered that never thereafter could flourish; those innocent love letters became (on the rare occasions that she wrote—having left her husband for some necessary foray and then on some pretext and then for her New York apartment) the pattern of escape. The world was sterile for her, though its population doubled and would redouble by the laws of population growth more quickly this time through. There is a kind of quiet, Maggie thinks, that’s peace, and there’s the calm before storms. Ian wanders the rooms like a caged, clawless leopard, padding the same circles as if home could seem a cell. She tells him he could leave.
Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) Page 36