by Hazel Woods
Hensley has not been in the house since the day of her father’s death. She has not thought much about that morning, but now she has the feeling that time has not passed here. That Berto’s fever has not changed, that his legs are still immovable, that the book he would not release is still held close, his hand gripping it, even in sleep.
She cannot help but think that if she had stayed here, in this room filled with illness and this half-dead body, she would not know of her father’s death. She could have nursed Berto, wringing out the wet rags, spooning broth into his inquiet mouth, massaging his limp legs, and never heard of the accident at the mine. Never seen her father’s poor, slack jaw, his fingers spread, as though in midgesture and midthought—his death both an uninvited and unwanted guest—the blood pooled beneath his chest in jagged, blue puddles.
She might still be ignorant. Returning to their own house only after dark, believing in her father’s untroubled sleep just behind his closed door. Believing the chessboard had been studied, the dishes in the kitchen dirtied, the cats stroked by his very alive hands.
But she had left. Though not before she’d imagined her dear Mr. Reid—not her father—wounded and helpless.
“He won’t give up this idea,” Teresa says, as she moves a jar of pickled vegetables from the edge of the counter to the back of the counter. “I’m sorry. But I’ve asked you for nothing. I don’t know what else to do.”
Hensley hesitates. Everything inside these four walls is disorienting. The sound of agitated insects hovering around the windows seems to be magnified and ominous. There is a strange damp coolness that moves through the room, like an ocean breeze. She shivers and pulls her father’s sweater even tighter across her body. “What do you mean?”
Hensley loses her balance and catches herself against Teresa’s arm. It is as though the house has become a boat and a sudden swell of water pushed the whole starboard side up, off balance. But there is dirt all around the outside of these walls. The house has not moved. There seems to be absolutely no cause to the effect.
“I am desperate,” Teresa says without meeting Hensley’s eyes. She throws a rag onto the counter. “I don’t know what else to do.”
Berto says something from his place in the corner.
“Is that you? Mama?”
Hensley looks at Teresa, but she will not meet her eyes. Her face is exhausted, dark shadows hanging below her eyes.
Hensley imagines the short distance back to her house. She could easily turn around and go. Teresa might even be grateful, saved from her own shame. She remembers how she wished Teresa would leave her alone with her grief. But she didn’t. She stayed and spooned broth into her mouth. This knowledge allows Hensley to be braver than she’d imagined herself to be. She walks toward Berto and sits close to him on the bed.
A thin white line of dried saliva runs around his mouth. His lips are cracked and pale.
He speaks again, quietly, his eyes closed. “Mama? I knew you’d be here.”
Hensley lifts her hand from her lap and places it gently upon his forehead. It is damp and hot. “Of course I’m here,” she says. “Right here.”
“I’m scared. Nothing makes sense. I can’t move.”
“Everything is going to be fine. You’ll see,” Hensley says as she remembers her own mother saying these words to her, both when Hensley was small and feverish and later, when she herself was lying in the big bed, dying.
“It’s all over. I don’t remember how it starts. Just this. Just this terrible ending.” His fingers wrap more tightly around the book that is still resting upon his chest. The scent on his breath is putrid.
Hensley turns her face away for a moment. She tries to picture Berto as a small child, smelling sweetly of warm sugar. She knows that his mother loved him, so she says this. “I love you, darling boy. There is much more than the ending. I know you remember. Remember when I held you in my lap and we sang? Remember all the wonderful stories? Some mornings you couldn’t wait any longer for a new one. You’d climb into bed with us. You’d push your small knees into my back and ask for another.”
For a moment, Berto is calm. His eyes are turned toward Hensley, but they are looking far beyond her. He releases his grip slightly on the book. Hensley says quietly to Teresa, “Should you read?”
From across the room, Teresa bristles. “It’s a stupid novel. About a guy and his parrot. My father read it to us as kids.” She wipes her hands on her skirt. “Berto always loved it, but he doesn’t want me to read it. I’ve tried.”
“But your family—its genealogy is written in there. Not in a Bible.”
Teresa smiles. “I suppose my ancestors were rebels.”
Hensley sighs. “I have no idea what’s going on here. I could try to get a doctor for Berto. I probably have enough for that.”
Berto moans. Hensley looks at his face. His cheeks are the inverse of Teresa’s, not full but sunken. He grips the book and thrashes his torso. Then he’s still again. He reaches out for Hensley. As she places her hand in his, he whispers.
“Don’t leave me. Please, Mama. Don’t leave.”
Hensley sighs. Once again she strokes his temple. “I’m right here.”
Teresa stands beside the bed with her hands on her hips. “Maybe it’s your condition.”
“Maybe. It’s okay. I don’t mind,” she lies. She can only close her eyes and try to imagine how her own mother loved her. Regardless of her tantrums or sickly breath or stupid ideas, she knows she was loved. So she holds Berto’s hand as she knows her own mother held hers, and she tells him that things will work out. She tells him that there will be another day when everything will look a little brighter. As she does this, she hopes it is true.
Yet again, she wishes this crazy world would hurl her up and out of this house, fling her across the black, salty ocean, and throw her into the tawny French dirt upon which Base Hospital #12 is planted.
Suddenly Berto opens his eyes. He looks at her without recognition. “What are you doing?” he says, pulling his hand away from hers and pushing her slightly with his elbow so that she is forced to stand.
Hensley is stunned, terrified by the look of disgust and fear on his face, as though it was she who was responsible for conjuring an intimacy that did not exist. Teresa takes Hensley by the arm, squeezing it with surprising force. “Come on,” Teresa says, her long black hair framing her wild, sad face.
Outside beneath a sky lit up with stars, Teresa puts her head close to Hensley’s. “I’m sorry. But thank you. You gave him some comfort. And me.”
“I’m not so sure. But you’re welcome.”
She takes Hensley’s cheeks into her hands. “The balance of things we do not know far outweighs what we do.” Hensley looks into Teresa’s dark brown eyes, which seem as black as the night, but far more mysterious.
“Why do you seem so unflappable? This”—she gestures to their small house—“this is a nightmare.”
Teresa does not smile. “The world likes us to be delicate.” Teresa drops her hands to Hensley’s abdomen. “How, exactly, is your body forming another? Doesn’t that seem impossible? An act of incredible strength? Just as unfathomable as any of this?” Hensley feels the warmth of Teresa’s hands through her nightdress. “A little heart, beating its own rhythm. Fingers and toes and a tongue with all its own taste buds. Think of that.”
Hensley’s cheeks are damp with tears, but she makes no move to wipe them. “Yet the simplest of things—boarding that train on Saturday—seems impossible.”
Teresa closes her eyes for a moment, leaving Hensley to her own thoughts. She remembers the morning she spent with Berto. “Why are you here?” she finally asks Teresa. “What is this place to you?”
Teresa opens her eyes. “The last place my mother was alive.”
“So it was here . . .”
“She left something behind. Our inheritance.”
“The goblets?”
Teresa drops her hands from Hensley’s body. Her eyes narrow. “How do you know?”
“Berto told me. That day that I was here. Is that it? You’re looking for the goblets?”
Teresa blinks her eyes in affirmation. “She ran. For days, dragging the two of us and those goblets through the desert at night. She thought we were being chased. She imagined horrible fates would fall upon us. We heard the hooves of Obregón’s army and watched from the far side of a canyon as they raced south, past us. She didn’t care. She was sure they would take us from her. That she couldn’t protect us. It was more than she could bear. One day, she left us by the creek. She was distraught, worrying that the goblets were too loud, too shiny. When she left she carried them with her, wrapped in a bedsheet. While she was away, Berto caught a fish. He was so proud. We waited and waited. When we couldn’t anymore, we walked upstream. Berto and I stood up there, just beyond the ridge, and watched as a strange, misplaced fire burned just in front of the bank.”
Hensley has seen the view from the top of the hill many times. She imagines seeing her own mother burning in the middle of the street, an irrecoverable, impossible pile of debris left to clean up. She reaches her hand out to Teresa’s. “They could be anywhere. Will you dig up the entire desert?”
The darkness seems to deepen around them as a wisp of a cloud covers the moon’s glow.
“Once Berto is well. Stranger things have happened,” Teresa says without any humor in her voice. She leaves Hensley’s side and goes inside to be with her brother, whose noisy, raspy sleep is audible through the screen.
Hensley walks quickly back down the hill without Teresa’s lantern, her feet slipping often over the uneven ground. She holds her hands out in front of her like the newly blind. When she finally reaches the brick patio, she is desperate to lay her hands on the bundle.
Her fingers frantically untie the ribbon and she unfolds the paper to see his carefully slanted words filling the entire page, his commas and periods and exclamation marks like the stars that anchor the myriad constellations in the night sky.
Dear Life, she thinks as she sinks to the floor, her feet and hands bleeding from their brief encounters with the junipers and hackberry bushes on the hill. Thank you for letting this part be true.
As the dawn arrives, casting its restrained light upon the wall beside her bed, Hensley’s eyes rest on the black ink listing that in which Mr. Reid believes.
With a terrible weariness, she pulls herself from the floor and writes one last letter.
Dear Mr. Reid,
What a strange night I’ve just had. I hope to tell all about it someday. For now, though, I must address your recent letter about what you believe. It is a lovely letter and it’s made me want more of myself. For you, too.
Things I know:
1.It is easier to lie than tell the truth.
2.Your words are the ones I would hold to my chest if I were dying. True or false, they are everything.
3.You will make it home and I will live out my days consoled by the fact that you are in the world.
4.I am pregnant.
Charles’s convalescence has been delayed by a fierce bout of pneumonia. By now, he might’ve been home, on his way to find Hensley. Instead, he has endured long days of feverish sleep, prickly skin, and impossible lethargy followed by nights in which he sat up, unable to breathe, straining to force some scrap of air into his lungs. He’d bang against the metal bed frame with the bedpan, panicked. Inevitably, his noise would wake the other fellows and he’d be shushed by a nurse, who would hold his hands above his head until the fit had passed.
He has no idea how many days have passed when he awakens to see Rogerson sitting beside him, his shirtsleeves covered in mud. For a moment, he believes he has overslept, that it’s all been a terribly vivid dream and that he’s about to catch hell. He wonders if there is time for coffee.
But as he looks around the room and feels the ache in his chest, the dull throbbing in his head, he knows.
“Still raining?” Charles asks, closing his eyes again.
“I’m waiting for my hot bath.”
“A good novel.”
“I’ve got something for you,” Rogerson says. “A letter.”
Charles opens his eyes slightly, just to see the familiar slant of her handwriting. Everything is blurry, but the shape of the envelope is clear.
“Apparently you’ve been so sick that you couldn’t even be roused for this. Shall I?” Charles cannot speak. “Of course I shall,” Rogerson says, clearing his throat. The sound of the envelope torn between Rogerson’s fingers sends a chill across Charles’s body.
His voice begins, articulating her words carefully.
“Dear Mr. Reid, What a strange night I’ve just had. I hope to tell all about it someday. For now, though, I must address your recent letter about what you believe. It is a lovely letter and it’s made me want more of myself. For you, too.” Here Rogerson stops, then adds in his own voice, “More, yes. We love more, Hensley. Right?” When Charles says nothing, he continues, “Things I know. It’s a list, Reid. Ready?”
Charles tries to nod his head. Rogerson continues. “One. It is easier to lie than tell the truth. Don’t we know it? Two. Your words are the ones I would hold to my chest if I were dying. True or false, they are everything. Sweet. God, she’s good. Three. You will make it home and I will live out my days consoled by the fact that you are in the world. She loves you, Reid. I mean, really. This is getting serious. Four. I am . . .” But Rogerson’s voice halts here.
Charles opens his eyes. “What?” he manages to say. “She is what?”
Rogerson folds the letter and replaces it in the envelope. Charles reaches his hand out, but it falls onto the bed, impotent.
“She is waiting for you, Reid. That’s all.” Rogerson’s hand is heavy and warm against Charles’s shoulder. “You’ve got to get the hell out of here, okay? Get out of here and go get her.”
Charles nods, weeping. The tears are warm, then cold, and he cannot hide them.
Hensley changes trains once again in Chicago, painfully aware of her solitude this time around. For several hours she settles herself onto a wooden bench near the ticket booth. As trains arrive and prepare to depart there is a great surge in the size of the crowd, but then it diminishes. It is as though the terminal is a beach and the passengers are its rhythmic, if irregular, waves.
Luckily, Thomas Wright’s arrival was delayed by more than a week and Hensley was able to pack her things properly and conjure a traveling skirt that allows the slight swell in her waist to be accommodated by a soft, pleated waistband. She knows it is ridiculous, but she wants to step off the train and shame Lowell by her beauty. She’d like to arrive more desirable than when she left.
On the morning of her departure, Hensley stood in the kitchen where she last saw her father alive. She cooked herself an egg in the cast-iron pan that was there when they arrived and would stay on, serving the house’s next resident. It was a good pan, well seasoned, with a shape somewhere between a circle and an oval. Just the sight of it made her hungry. So many slices of ham and bacon had been fried in it that everything came out slightly smoky. She ate the egg right out of the pan, imagining the face her father would have made to express his disdain for her slovenly manners.
Her father’s desk, her own sewing machine, the silver tea service, and several boxes of personal items including her father’s chess set were bundled in the corner of the living room, to be sent to New York separately. Hensley just had a trunk and one valise to take on the train. Mr. Reid’s letters were tucked into her own satchel, which would not leave her side.
The truck sat in front of the house, idling. Teresa came in, her boots striking hard against the wood floor.
“Ready?�
�� she called, her voice pitched low like her brother’s.
They had spoken little since their middle-of-the-night encounter a week before.
“Almost,” Hensley called from the kitchen.
Teresa poked her head in the doorway.
Hensley had her fork in the pan, scooping the eggs onto it. “You caught me. Want a fork?”
Teresa’s boots clomped across the floor. She took a clean fork from the dish rack. “I’m starving.”
They ate the buttery eggs in silence, like an old married couple. The truck idled outside, filling their thoughts with the imminent journey.
Finally, Teresa pulled the brim of her hat down hard and said, “We should probably go.”
“Okay. I’ll just clean this pan.”
Teresa turned away from her. “Good eggs. Thank you,” she said. Soon, Hensley saw her carry the impossibly heavy trunk and suitcase out and heave them into their place in the truck bed.
Hensley wiped the pan dry and then scooped up Isaac, who had been slinking between her legs all morning. Rubbing his little white face with her knuckles, she told him to be good. Newton was nowhere to be found, but she placed the last of the milk into a dish and left it by the back door.
Hensley stood once more in front of her bedroom wall, wishing she could take the whole thing with her, wondering how she would bear to awaken each morning without his words being the first thing she saw. Despite the trouble it might cause, Teresa had acquiesced to Hensley’s pleas to leave it until she’d gone. Hensley leaned her cheek against the wall, the morning sun already making it warm.
You are going to become another man’s bride, she told herself. This has to be the end.
Hensley tried to conjure the way Lowell’s face looked to her when they first met. When it had appeared innocent, handsome, even. But instead she could only picture the words of his telegram. I would be remiss if I did not extend the offer of a marriage. She understood how loath he was to see her again. Could this be, in fact, their only commonality?