Dear girls,
…I’ve told you that the Man Tree was weeks ago stripped completely bare but in fact there was one last leaf still clinging stubbornly to a branch. Watching it lift and twist painfully in the wind, unable to let go, I sensed its torment and considered going out with a broom and knocking it down just to put it out of its misery. But this morning when I got up out of bed and looked out, I saw that finally it had released its grip…
Yesterday I could reach neither Muriel nor Anna on the phone, so I was forced to call Goodie.
“Is tomorrow’s bridge game at Anna’s house?” I asked. It was the sixth game since William’s stroke.
“No,” she answered. “I’m afraid the bridge is finished altogether. We’ve dissolved the group.”
“Dissolved?”
“We’ve all grown tired of the game and we’ve decided to quit.”
“But no one asked me about this.”
“The majority rules. It was a unanimous decision among the three of us. We didn’t need your vote.”
“What will I do now? Bridge is my only outlet.”
“You could form another group, with other women.”
“But I don’t know any other women.”
“I’m sorry,” Goodie said firmly, “I have to hang up. My books are overdue at the library.”
After lunch, I dressed warmly and left the house, heading south in the snow. After some time, I turned down a road and passed along neat rows of brick bungalows. The houses looked very much alike, but, certain I had the right street, I walked along, peering like a cyclops with my one good eye into all the living-room windows until finally I came to one where the lamps were glowing like yellow moons in the winter afternoon. Sure enough, I saw Muriel, Goodie, Anna and a strange woman sitting at a table, a bridge game in full swing. Watching them, I imagined the slap slap slap of the cards on the table, the sound of which, as recently as yesterday, I’d heard in my future, washing like a soothing tide over all my weeks. I pictured the moody royal family in their ornate and cumbersome robes — the melancholy king, the passive queen, the angry prince — dealt out in their endlessly spinning configurations, so distant from each other, locked in their royal cabinets studded in the corners with the gemlike clubs, spades, diamonds, hearts: the crown jewels.
Picking my way to the centre of Anna’s lawn, I bent over and seized a handful of snow. In my haste to leave the house, I’d forgotten to resurrect my winter gloves. The paralyzing cold instantly froze my fingers and travelled up my wrists. However, I managed to form the snow, which was heavy and wet, perfect for my needs, into a firm ball. I hurled it at Anna’s window, surprising myself by hitting the mark dead-on. Evidently I was less blind than Goodie thought. My reward was a shriek from within the house, loud enough to travel through the double pane.
The women heaved themselves up from the table and hurried to the window, where fragments of the exploded snowball slowly slid down the glass. When they saw me, red-handed as it were and ankle-deep in snow, their jaws dropped open.
I reached for more ammunition and heard a shout of rage go up behind the window. The women pounded angrily on the glass with their fists. When I brought my arm back to hurl the second snowball, they screamed in unison and beat a clumsy retreat. I saw a lamp, one golden planet, go down in the confusion. Moments later, Goodie appeared once more, speaking into a phone, her lips moving rapidly. Reaching into my pocket, I withdrew a paperweight I’d brought along, knowing in my heart of hearts what I was going to see through Anna’s window. I threw it with all my might. Despite her display of farm-bred courage, Goodie yelped when she saw it coming. It hit the target. At the impact, Goodie lost her grip on the phone and dropped out of sight. A spider’s web formed in the window, its glittering threads shooting like lightning to the four corners.
Just then the front door opened a few inches, Muriel’s face pressed fearfully to the crack.
“What’s come over you, Morgan?” she called, her voice shaky. “Have you completely lost your mind? We’ve called 911. They’re on their way. You’ve done damage. You’ll pay for that window! We’ll see to it you never pick up another bridge hand in this town…”
Her voice followed me as I beat a path down the street, eager to make my getaway before the police arrived with their paddy wagon.
Dear girls,
…When I arrived home today, I saw that up and down the street the neighbourhood children had constructed an army of snowmen. You may not know that the winters here have become very mild. Soon the temperatures will warm and these local heroes, these fragile soldiers, will begin to drip and shrink into the earth and their makers, the little children, like fickle gods, will forget about them. Just as God seems to have forgotten about your father. And I can hardly blame him because I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s grown quite weary of having his ear bent by all the devotions and spirituals and vigils of Morris and his holy-rolling congregation, and refuses to hear another word about William Hazzard…
November 12
Dear girls,
…Following a small dispute I had with the bridge ladies, a policeman knocked on my door yesterday afternoon and asked if he might come in and talk to me. I led him into the living room and gestured to your father’s chair, with its pillar of newspapers beside it. He sat down with his cap tucked under his arm, looking very fine in his dark blue suit, and took out a pad and paper. He said he’d received a complaint about a broken picture window. Did I know anything about it?
Yes, I said.
You’re responsible for the breakage, then? he asked. You freely admit it?
Of course, I said.
You don’t look like the kind of person who’d do such a thing.
I’d like to be.
With all due respect, Ma’am, he said, you’re a little elderly to be embarking on a life of crime.
He was short and mildly good-looking, but not enough so to be called handsome. An almost sort of person, never quite anything, I suspected. One of those people life washes over and almost forms into something interesting. Almost handsome. Almost successful. Almost happy. Something like your brother, Morris, I thought, who is almost holy.
The policeman asked me why I’d broken the window and I told him the bridge ladies had lied to me.
He said a person couldn’t go around smashing people’s property because of a lie. There was the law to consider.
Then I said, I’ve lived a life of conformity and I’m tired of obeying and being underestimated. I feel nothing but pride for what I’ve done. I think dishonesty is a worse offence than disobedience.
He reflected for a moment and then said, In spite of being a policeman, I’m tempted to break the law myself sometimes because it interferes with — with a person’s — he searched for the right word.
Dignity? I asked and he nodded.
He said it must have taken a lot of courage to confront my friends. Are you widowed? he asked. I told him about your father’s stroke and he said, You must find the house very empty now that you’re alone.
On the contrary, I said, there finally seems to be space here for me. I want to make myself over.
And he said, I’ve thought of that myself but I don’t know how to go about it or where to start.
I said, Maybe some sort of shock is the only way it can happen, something totally beyond your control and outside yourself to put it in motion.
He said he felt he wasn’t very attractive to people, to women especially, and that maybe he was too passive a person, too complacent and dull, someone who wasn’t noticeable. He asked me if I knew a Goodie Hodnet and said that she’d fainted when I threw the paperweight and that she’d struck her head on the corner of a coffee table, temporarily losing consciousness. By the time he arrived on the scene, she was being slid into an ambulance. He tracked her down at the hospital and found her with a bruised temple and a bandage, under which there were ten stitches. She’d told him she intended to sue me for physical injury and psychological damage and loss
of happiness.
Loss of happiness?
Some people do think you can put a dollar figure on it.
I asked him if I was to be arrested and he almost smiled but managed to hold it back and said no, which I must say somewhat disappointed me.
Are you sure you don’t want to take me down to the station? I asked, thinking it would give us more time to talk.
I don’t believe that will be necessary.
Is your work dangerous? I asked, escorting him to the front door.
He said with some disappointment, Not really. This is the sort of thing I do. Investigate minor complaints. It’s a pretty quiet job. There’s a good pension waiting for me, though.
I said, You have something to look forward to, then.
Before leaving, he stopped and looked at all the pictures of you girls in your college gowns and caps, which your father displays so proudly in the front hall, and he said, I was almost married once. He told me he never would have believed he’d reach thirty-four and not have a wife. All he wanted, he said, was a woman’s arms to lie in at night. Someone regular, he said, who cared about him.
I answered that I hated to disillusion him, but marriage was no guarantee of that…
November 13
Dear girls,
…When your father finally came home after the war, his face was as pitted as the moon’s crust.
William, I remember saying, I hardly recognize you. What’s happened to your face?
Those sons o’ bitches, Morgan, he explained. We’ve all come back looking like this. Anyone exposed to the explosive mixture in the bombs. It’s a wonder I’m not blind too. The abrasion. The chemicals. But did they do anything about it? Even after we told them? Showed them our skin? Of course not. What would they care? Those sons o’ bitches…
Before I pulled the curtains at bedtime tonight, I looked down into the yard at the destroyed Wife Tree, the sight of its broken flesh, like an amputated limb, making my knees shake. I reached out and touched the window frame to steady myself, thinking of the time my father and brothers came home unexpectedly from the fields. It was a hot August day and I was in the kitchen peeling and pitting peaches for canning, my clothes, my hair stuck to my body, fruit juice running down my wrists to my elbows. I was sixteen, the only girl left at home. All the others had married or moved away to find work. On the edge of the kitchen cot sat my mother, feeding Thomas. Now that he was almost completely paralyzed, she’d withdrawn from the daily tasks of farm life, immersing herself in his care.
At ten in the morning we heard the wagon rumble into the yard and a moment later, my brother Lance lurched into the kitchen, leaning heavily on my father’s shoulder, a bloody cloth wrapped around his wrist. Another brother, Clive, followed them in. There’d been an accident with the thresher. Lance’s arm had been pulled into the blades, his hand chopped off. Clive, seeing this, had quickly signalled to my father to cut the engine. A search was made in the machine and the hand found in the straw, miraculously whole.
On the wood stove, clouds of vapour, boiling up out of kettles, condensed on the kitchen windows and streamed down like rain. Mason jars, simmering in the sterilizer, jingled musically in their wire racks. The air was sweet with the smell of canning syrup. Clive set the severed hand down on the table, stepped swiftly outside and retched off the back stoop.
The hand lay among the ribbons of peach skin and the heaps of stony fruit pits. We all stared at it as though we’d never seen one before. Meaty and bluish as a steak, it looked foreign and monstrous. Lance saw my mother turn Thomas’s head aside and cover his eyes.
“I’ve just lost my goddamned hand,” Lance said bitterly, “and all you can think of is Thomas! Don’t let Thomas see anything bad. I have to protect Thomas.”
“He has nothing to do with this,” my mother said. “You leave him out of it.”
Lance, a stocky man of twenty-six now, with a big, fleshy face, had always fancied himself a lady-killer. He liked to have a new girl on his arm every week. On Saturday nights, he splashed around in the kitchen basin after supper, slicking back his hair, cleaning his long fingernails, getting in my way when I needed to be doing the dishes. Reeking of Aqua Velva, he took the buggy into town, returning in the small hours of the morning, liquor on his breath. I prayed every week that he’d meet a girl he wanted to marry and leave us in peace.
“Thomas is the only one you’ve ever cared about,” Lance told my mother in the kitchen.
“Hold your tongue, son,” my father said. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
Then Lance seized the severed hand from among the bowls of fruit and threw it across the room at my mother. It struck her full on the cheek with the force of a stone, leaving a streak of blood. Turning away, her face a wooden mask, she bent protectively over Thomas. My father dragged Lance outside and we heard the wagon rattle off.
“Get that hand out of here,” my mother told me. In the confusion, they’d left it behind. It had rolled under Thomas’s cot. Little use it would have been to the doctors, anyway. They didn’t sew limbs back on in those days. They didn’t have the know-how.
I drew back in horror. “Me?”
“Go and bury it somewhere.”
“But —”
“Don’t be so squeamish. You’ve chopped the head off many a chicken and lived to eat the bird.”
“But they weren’t — human,” I said faintly.
“Get rid of it. It’s no good to anybody now.”
My stomach heaving, I wrapped the hand gingerly in a tea towel and carried it out into a field. It was heavier than I’d expected, roughly the weight of a large rat, and strangely potent, making me dizzy with its power. The sky tipped, the sunny field swam in my vision, a yellow rocking sea. Sweating with the day’s heat, employing a shovel I’d found in the barnyard, I managed to dig a hole. I threw the hand in, eager to be rid of it, and quickly covered it over with earth.
Lance’s name wasn’t mentioned in the house while he was in hospital, but sometimes in the late afternoons, after the chores were finished, my father slipped away to town to visit him. A month later, he brought my brother home, a steel hook strapped to his wrist. Passing him in the barnyard the first day he was home, I couldn’t look at it. He saw my discomfort and grabbed me.
“What’s wrong with you?” he sneered, his teeth bared. “Afraid of this lovely thing?” He shook me. “Well, you’re going to have to live with it, just like I am. Look at it. Look! You’d better get used to the sight.” He gripped me by the chin and turned my face into the hook, rubbing the cold steel curve hard against my cheek. “Where did the hand go?” he hissed, his breath hot and moist against my neck.
“The hand?”
He shook me again. “Don’t play dumb! Where is it?”
“I — I got rid of it. Mother told me to.”
“How?”
“I buried it in — in the field.”
“Take me there. Show me where it is.”
“I — I don’t remember exactly where I put it. And it’s a month now. It’ll be — rotted!”
Dear girls,
…I’m sure it’s quite hard for you to imagine, in those hot climates of yours, how the yard looks today, a sea of cotton wool. Yesterday, we had a substantial snowstorm and on my journey home I saw a cardinal sitting on a white branch. Its brilliant colour reminded me that another vase of hand-delivered, cardless red roses appeared a few days ago in your father’s room, their giver, the mysterious woman, whoever she is, having tracked him down on Second East.
For several hours I had to sit beside the bouquet, until finally I was so overwhelmed by its sickening perfume that I got up from my chair and grasped the thorny stems. I pulled them out of the vase and threw them with great force into the wastebasket. Seeing me do it, your father turned away toward the wall, curled up in the fetal position and went to sleep while I flushed the blood from my thorn-pricked fingers down his little hospital sink…
November 14
Dear
girls,
… I feel quite troubled by something that has happened. Yesterday when I came home early from the hospital because of a headache, Morris was at the house. He was in my bedroom when I arrived and as I opened the front door, something in there — a drawer? — banged shut and then he appeared, quite surprised and flustered.
Mom, he said, I thought you stayed with Dad until they brought around the supper trays.
What are you doing here, Morris? I asked.
Just a visit, Mom, he said, smiling sheepishly.
But, I said, if you thought I was at the hospital, why didn’t you just go there?
I don’t know, Mom, he answered. I guess I got distracted and the next thing I knew I was in the driveway. Force of habit. His eyes slid away from mine.
Strange, I said, watching him closely. He looked very guilty, girls, which is unlike Morris. He was always such an innocent boy. Observing his flushed and perspiring face, I thought: This is not my son…
Dear girls,
…Are there extra blankets? I asked one of the nurses on Second East. In a cupboard somewhere? If you could just point the way, I’d be happy to fetch one myself.
We provide only one per patient, she told me. That’s all we have. It’s the cutbacks.
But the blankets here are so thin, I said, and my husband is so terribly cold…
Since William’s fall, I’ve remained faithful to our daily diet of a potato, thinking that my consumption of it might somehow give him strength. Tonight, reaching into the burlap sack, I found the potatoes grown cold with winter, cold with a subterranean chill, reminding me of William’s icy feet beneath his thin and rationed hospital blanket. Just as I set my foot on the bottom stair, the bare bulb flickered and went out, plunging me into utter darkness.
I was thrown back immediately to a dark night, the winter after Lance lost his hand. I’d gone out to the root cellar around five o’clock to collect vegetables stored there at harvest time. Bushel baskets of apples, crates of cabbages, turnips, parsnips, onions, squash stood about, so numerous you had to pick your way carefully across the floor. I’d thrust my fingers deep in a tray of sand, searching for carrots, which, stored this way, kept well into the winter. The light from the lamp I’d set nearby on a shelf holding jars of plump sausages preserved in fat and poached chicken floating in broth — delicacies we brought out when unexpected company dropped in — suddenly died. For a moment I thought the lamp had run out of oil, but then I remembered a good supply swirling in the glass receptacle as I’d come out from the house after sundown, and I knew that the wick had been turned down by an unseen hand.
The Wife Tree Page 9