As I lowered the box onto the chair now, I was standing close to her head, and she sniffed at me and narrowed her eyes. My heart leaped into my throat, thinking that she must have detected George on me, the smell of our sex. But she shook her head and said, “Old books,” and asked me to show her what I’d brought.
We spent some time going through the contents of the box. I pulled out the volumes one by one and read the titles aloud, and if she recognized one she’d make a comment about it, and if it was something she hadn’t heard of, she’d ask me what I knew. But I didn’t have any more information than she did; there were books near the bottom that I’d never heard of or even laid eyes on before. They were my parents’ books: things they’d either forgotten to take or else decided to leave behind when they moved into town. There was an old hymnal, a First Communion book, a couple of Western novels, including The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and The Prodigal Judge—Lydie said she thought she’d heard of those two, maybe—and there were several autobiographies by soldiers who’d fought in World War I. I wasn’t sure who would have bought those, since my brother had died over there and it was something that was never talked of in our family for fear of upsetting my mother. The books might have been Herbert’s; he was the only one besides Edith who’d liked to read, and I figured Edith was far too young to have been buying those accounts when they were first published. But it seemed a strange thing, too, to imagine my brother, the minister, reading about poison gas and trench warfare—
Lydie yanked me from this reverie with a command to continue going through the box. I reached in and pulled out the next layer, which consisted entirely of old editions of the Saturday Evening Post, all their covers tearing off at the spines, and I thought of how my mother had read those magazines cover to cover each week, even in her darkest times, when she wouldn’t do much of anything else. I told Lydie about this, how she’d slap away our hands if we tried to take a look at one before she’d gotten the chance. “She said it was her one and only prize for getting through another week,” I explained.
“Is there a prize? I never did hear about that.”
“No, me either. I’m not expecting any thank-yous from Joe or Debbie, not anytime soon.” I flipped open one of the magazines and read a headline aloud.
Lydie was quiet for a moment. “How are they? Joe and Debbie.”
“They’re fine. John Charlie’s got Joe working the milking machines. Debbie’s probably under Rena’s foot most of the day, but that’s all right.”
Another pause. Then: “You see my boys while you were over there?”
I flipped another page, scanning the print. “They must have been off working somewhere. So much for us mothers being the only ones.”
“And George? You didn’t see him, either?”
I turned another page, trying to ignore the way my chest felt as if it had been filled with vinegar and baking soda, fizzing away and making breathing difficult. “He came in just for a minute, while we were sitting on the porch.”
A fly thwapped the window by Lydie’s head, and her hand twitched in response, as if to swat it away. By now it was too painful for her to move her upper body, and so both hands remained at her sides. “He want to talk to you?”
I closed the magazine now and set it down on top of the others. If Lydie wanted to follow this line of talk, I figured it wouldn’t do me any good to pretend I was too distracted to pay attention. There was a little space at the foot of the bed, and I sat down now and said, yes, in fact, George had asked to speak with me in private.
Lydie had her eyes closed, and I couldn’t tell her reaction. After a moment, she asked what he’d said.
“What do you think? He wanted to know how you’re doing.”
“The phone reports aren’t enough,” she said, more a statement than a question.
“He’s your husband, Lydie. It’s breaking his heart not to be here.”
She opened her eyes now and looked down the bed at me. Her eyes were bright—not glowing, exactly, but almost as if they might be putting off heat. “That’s not true.”
“You don’t think it’s hurting him to be away from you right now?”
She ran her tongue over her teeth and made a sucking sound. Her mouth got dry sometimes, and I thought of going to the kitchen to pour her a glass of water, but I was half afraid she’d reach out and grab my wrist to keep me from leaving. “I do think it’s hurting him,” she said. “Him, and the boys, too. I imagine they all feel bad enough when they think about me over here.” Her eyes wandered back to the ceiling. “But I don’t think they’re getting their hearts broken,” she said. “That’s the whole reason I sent them away, to keep that from happening.”
“And you’re not rethinking that decision?”
“No.”
I waited a minute and then left the room to get that glass of water—with a straw, since it was easier for her to drink that way lying down. When I came back, she lifted her head from the pillow and took a small sip. It went down the wrong pipe, though, and in a moment she was coughing violently, her whole body seizing up with the effort. It was half a minute or longer before she had done. Then she lay breathing hard, her face tight with pain. “Can I get you anything?” I asked.
She shook her head.
I watched her breathing in and out, her chest rising and falling beneath the sheet. When I last bathed her a few days before, I’d had to turn away when I saw her left breast; the skin had broken across an area several inches around. “I can’t look at it myself, anymore,” Lydie had said. “Just clean up as quick as you can, and if you need to look away, you go ahead and look away.”
After her coughing fit, I left Lydie to rest and went into the kitchen to fix myself some coffee and a snack. I was drinking coffee all throughout the day now, not just mornings, and eating bits and pieces of things while standing up at the counter: saltine crackers and slices of cheese, tuna from the can, a hard-boiled egg. Every couple of days I’d make a pot of plain chicken soup, and that was about all that Lydie ate.
I decided to make myself some toast, and while the bread was in the toaster I got some butter and preserves from the fridge. I was nearing the bottom of a jar of blackberry preserves that had the year 1959 scrawled on masking tape stuck to the lid, and every time I looked at it I’d find myself meditating on this date, on the oddity of eating blackberries picked during a completely different era of my life. The summer of 1959, when these preserves were canned, was the first summer after Karol died. It was the year I’d begun my affair with George. We might have been in bed together at the exact moment Lydie was plucking berries from the vine. Back then, I’d occasionally thought of what I did with George as a kind of salvo I was firing against the judgment of the world. It had seemed a bold thing; it was my secret act of defiance.
That was all done now. I was bound to Lydie—though I didn’t know whether it was anger or love that did it, whether it was an honor or a punishment that she was bestowing upon me.
What did she know?
I turned over this question a hundred times a day. But I could never find a way to ask it.
When Lydie woke again, I heated up a little soup on the stove for her to eat. It was afternoon, neither dinnertime nor suppertime, but that didn’t matter. Time was a strange thing in that house, bendable. It would double back on itself so that one afternoon felt so similar to another that I wasn’t at all certain that they weren’t one and the same. But then, too, I’d realize that a whole week had passed, and though not a single event had happened during the course of those seven days to make it stand out, if I compared one Sunday to the last, I knew that her health was going downhill fast.
I brought the soup into the living room and pulled up the footstool to sit beside her. As I dipped the spoon into the bowl, she said she didn’t feel like eating.
“You haven’t had anything all day.”
“Haven’t I?” Her eyes swam past my face. “I could’ve sworn I ate this morning.”
“No, you
didn’t.” I ventured to dip the spoon in again, but this time she spoke more forcefully: “I said I don’t want it.”
“Fine,” I said, standing. “I’ll put it back in the fridge for later.”
“I’m not going to want it then, either.”
I stood looking down at her and waited for more: an outburst, an explanation. When nothing came, I said, “You might change your mind,” and then went and put the soup away again. Afterward, I went out on the porch and sat awhile on my own. Not a sound came from the living room, and though I wondered if Lydie wanted me to come in and talk with her, or read to her, or turn on the radio, I didn’t move for a long time—an hour or more—during which I sat listening to the whine of the summer cicadas and slapping at mosquitoes that landed on my arms, and feeling sorry for myself, and angry at myself, wondering how I’d managed to get tangled up in the business of another woman’s dying, and wanting it all to be over, and then hating myself most for what that wanting meant.
That evening, I read to Lydie from some of the old Posts. The earliest one was from 1913, two years before I was born, and the latest one was from 1930. My parents must have stopped subscribing around that time, and never picked up again after the hard times ended. It had taken long enough for those times to go, and then it was the war, and then it was the trouble with Junior, and then it was my parents moving into town. The world got close enough then, I guess, that my mother didn’t need the magazine to tell her about it anymore.
I read about the first bird known to have crossed the Atlantic and an old opera singer named Clara Louise Kellogg, and Lydie drifted in and out. By the time it was dark, I was ready for bed myself, and I roused her to take her to the bathroom one last time and then I went into the other room.
Though I was feeling tired, it took me a long time to fall asleep. Hours, maybe. I floated, moving between thinking and dreaming. A memory came of Lydie before she got sick, sitting at my kitchen table with a lit cigarette and talking about Mamie Eisenhower. A phrase—not even a complete sentence—echoed in my ear: “. . . prune whip and canasta in the White House!” Cigarette waving through the air, smoke curling up toward the ceiling. This all came to me as clearly as if caught under glass, but then I remembered all of a sudden that the only time I ever saw her smoke was in St. Louis, at the bar. Parts of that memory might have been true, but not all of it was. Maybe I was asleep, after all.
It wasn’t until the next day that we finished going through the box of books I’d brought back from my house. In the morning, after I’d made myself some eggs and had some more toast—Lydie still wouldn’t eat anything, and I didn’t fight her on it—she asked if I’d read to her some more.
“You want the Post again? More on men’s fashions for Easter? Or the question of whether women should get the vote?”
“That sounds all right,” Lydie said with a smile that turned into a grimace of pain. I noticed it and stayed quiet, since she’d made clear to me that she didn’t want to talk about how she was feeling anymore.
I went to grab a new magazine, but we were at the bottom of the box and instead of more Posts, I found a book. It had a plain cloth cover with the title Prayers from the Middle Kingdom, Vol. IV. The paper inside had gone yellow and was mildewed around the edges. I figured it was a religious book, something that Herbert had brought home when he was studying to go into the ministry. Paging through, I saw that it was filled with poems. I flipped the pages, reading out titles. Some had titles that were Christian in nature; others seemed more like nature poems. Still others had words I didn’t recognize: “When the Chih-fu Hears a Plea” and “Midnight Fog on the Ch’ang Chiang.” Reading them aloud, I stumbled over the strange words. “What do you think they are?”
“Foreign, I guess,” Lydie said. “Why don’t you read a few.”
So I recited the one about fog and another about cooking rice over an open fire. It was only once I was reading them aloud that I remembered about my mother’s sister, who had gone to Asia as a missionary many years before I was born. She and her family had been murdered by the Boxers, and like the other tragedies my mother suffered, it was something she never talked about. I don’t believe she ever even mentioned her sister’s name in my hearing. But Edith and I had heard the story from somewhere (probably Rena, who was older than us and seemed to know everything we didn’t), and it had caught our curiosity. For years as children, whenever Edith and I had a spare playmate and were away from any listening ears, we’d play a morbid game of “Boxers and Christians,” which was just like tag except that the one playing the Boxer got to carry a stick and, if she caught the ones playing Christians, got to stab them in the heart.
“Goodness, I remember that game,” Lydie cut in as I was explaining.
“You do?”
“Sure I do.” Her eyes were open, but because she didn’t turn her neck, it looked like she was talking to the ceiling. “First, I remember being confused by the name because it seemed that it should involve fighting with fists. And then, too, I used to hate it because Edith was so vicious playing the Boxer. She’d raise that stick like it was a long sword, and I’d fear I was going to lose my head.”
“The one playing the Boxer was supposed to aim for the heart,” I said, laughing. “Edith should have known that. I never played with you, I guess?”
“You were so much older. Seven years at that age is an ocean of time.”
“What an awful game,” I said after a moment. “Especially since it was my aunt who really did get killed.”
We speculated on where the book had come from—whether it was my mother who’d bought it, or whether it was given as a gift (“A strange sort of gift,” Lydie said in a wry tone)—and how it had ended up at the bottom of this box. But there was no figuring it out. My mother had been dead for more than a decade. “A mystery,” Lydie declared, “that’s better than any Agatha Christie novel. Let’s hear another and see if we can solve it.”
I flipped to a page and read aloud:
FORGIVE ME (LORD GOD, IN WHOM ALL GRACE RESIDES)
Two words carved with a knife so sharp
Into this table o’ wood
But, Lord, I will speak true to Thee:
I did whate’er I could.
Forgive me, then, I beg You, Lord,
For that which gives me Shame—
For Selfishness and Secrecy
And crimes without a name.
’Tis only through Thy Grace, O’ Lord,
My soul’s great Hope be met:
To be washed clean, to be made whole;
All Sins, like blood, be let.
A silence rose after I’d read the last line. I felt pinned, pointed to, outlined in red. For a moment, I had the strange thought that Lydie had instructed me to read that particular poem on purpose—that she was telling me that she knew, after all, that she knew everything. But then I remembered that I was the one who had chosen it.
“I believe,” she said at last, “I’ve heard recipes written better than that.”
“Not a great poet, this Mr. Wickford.”
“No, he isn’t. Wasn’t.” She blinked at the ceiling and said, “I guess you’ll be reading prayers over me soon enough.”
“Lydie!” I said.
She frowned and shook her head. She was forty-one years old and marching quickly toward death while the rest of the world went on as if it didn’t matter. In a month I’d be back at work, serving Gene when he came through the cafeteria line; Bobby would come around the house to see Joe; even George I’d see often enough to talk over the business of the farm. I’d be seeing them all soon, and for years to come.
But for now, the dew was burning off the grass and the bees were flying through the clover, and a squirrel, ignorant of it all, was hopping branch to branch with its big tail quivering in the air like a question mark. Lydie’s eyes were closed. A soft breeze moved the curtains. Down the road, I thought, her boys were coaxing the corn up out of the soil, and in a month, it would be as tall as either of us, o
r taller.
Correspondence
30
July 1, 1900
Dear Louisa,
Lately, I have been thinking very much of the past. I am remembering a certain day some eighteen or nineteen years ago, when you and I were walking out the high road near the house. Flora was with us, but we weren’t walking with her. She was already so stiff and proper—you know. Twelve or thirteen, she must have been at the time, but already as elderly in her behavior as old Mrs. Bly. She was behind us, I think, not walking as quickly as we were, taking her time in those silly shoes she liked to wear. Anyway, as I recall, we came to the top of the open hill, and you and I looked at each other and then we looked back at Flora, and “Oh, please, you two, don’t” was all she said, but it was too late because we were already running down. It was much too steep, I knew that before we began down. You might have, too, or maybe not—you were perhaps seven years old, and not as wise as my nine years. In any case, we most certainly would have run it before then if it weren’t just this side of dangerous.
Do you remember, Louisa? Do you remember the exhilaration, the wind, the clouds streaming past, the blur of grass and those little purple flowers all around? It was exquisite, for what might have been only a brief moment but felt like an endless time—I know I lost track of you and would have forgot you altogether, except for your voice screaming in glee somewhere a little behind me, a little ragged shout—but anyway, it was pure joy and wonder, and then I tripped. I went tumbling head over foot, down and down, and I knocked my head on a stone or a root, and great God, did it hurt. By the time I got to the bottom I was seeing stars. And you came tumbling after. Later, when I asked whether you tripped at the same time, you told me you fell on purpose. “I saw you go down,” you said, “and thought I should do it, too.”
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