The End of Always: A Novel

by Randi Davenport

  “He had another arrangement in mind,” I said at last.

  “I just thought. If you had another prospect.” She fingered the buttons on her blouse.

  “It does not matter,” I said. “I would not have married him.”

  “You preferred August Bethke,” she said. She made his name sound like a curse or a disease.

  “Yes,” I said. But now when I thought of August, I thought not only of the way he made me shudder with pleasure in the dark. I also thought of the gun he kept hidden in a bucket under the washstand, which I had found one day, and which he had explained away by saying he needed a gun for protection, although he would not tell me just what it was he needed to protect himself from. And then I thought of the knife he wore strapped to his waist. Of the low sling of his tool belt with its hammers and sharp screwdrivers and something like the talons of a bird rolled into a ball that he could use to pry out nails. Then I thought again of the touch of his hand, the smell of his hair, the taste of him, the sounds he made when he was with me, all of it a confusing world of things that did not add up as I had expected.

  Martha lay back down on her hip and picked up a small stick. She ran the point of the stick through the dirt. “Do you like being married?” she asked in a prim voice.

  “Yes.” But I could not help myself. I looked away and would not meet her gaze.

  “All of it?”

  “Yes.” But I would not tell her about the part I did not like and we would never ever talk about the part I did.

  “Everything?” she said. Now she would not look at me.

  “You will like it, too,” I said. “You will see. When you marry George.”

  Martha flushed. “I do not want to talk about George,” she said. “Not that way.”

  “Why not?” I said. I could hear the callous tone in my voice. “He is just like all the rest.”

  She stiffened. “How would you know?”

  “Oh, I know,” I said, my words suddenly something I wore like a lead vest that would sink me once and for all. I sagged deeper into the grass. I felt old and experienced. I thought I would drown in the things I had begun to realize were true.

  Flies hummed under the leaves. The grass smelled sweet and dry and spread away from us in a plaited yellow slope.

  “Why did you come?” Martha said abruptly.

  “Perhaps I missed you.”

  “You did not miss me.”

  “I did.” I glanced back at the house and felt a surge of sadness break over me and the world became airless then. “And I missed Hattie,” I said gently. “I wish she was here.”

  “You did not miss us,” Martha said flatly. “You need something.”

  I pressed my lips together and did not say anything. I thought of all the things I needed and the wishes that had gone unanswered and the sharpness of those thoughts ran through me like a knife. I could not understand why it was so wrong to need my family to care for me.

  “I miss you,” I said. “I think about you every day.”

  Martha sat up. “For once in your life, tell the truth,” she said. “You think I am stupid but I already know why you are here.” She waved her hand at my father’s house. “What else would bring you back?”

  I rolled onto my stomach and put my head on my arms. In a buried and strained voice I told her that I needed some money for food. She did not have to give me much. Just something from the money I had earned at the laundry. Something I could hide in a shoe or under a floorboard and keep for myself. Something that would let me eat. August was so busy, I said. August worked so hard. He did not mean to but sometimes he forgot. That was understandable. He had so much to do. It was like this for lots of new wives. Of that I was sure.

  She did not say anything until I was finished. Then she stood up. She waved her hands around her head to dispel a swarm of gnats. She turned to look back across the clearing, where the yellow siding of my father’s house made a broken shape behind the trees. “Come back to the house,” she said. “I will give you what I have.”

  In the end, I bought a very small piece of cheese and a piece of a dry sausage and three apples and three potatoes and two cans of peas and a loaf of bread. It took me a long time to decide but I knew I had to pick things that would last. I sat on a bench in front of a cigar store and slowly ate the cheese and half of the sausage and a heel of the bread. I looked in the bag as I ate and counted my things and then tied the bag with its ropey cord.

  It rained late in the afternoon and the lights flickered and went out. I stood in the dim kitchen. August had the matches. The wind came up and the trees tossed and the rain seethed along the side of the house and pelted the windows. I listened to the thunder break and roll. I flinched when lightning flashed. I lay down on the bed in my clothes and looked at the ceiling and thought about the rain slashing through Bertha’s flowers and about Martha as she pulled the money from my mother’s old leather purse and about Edwin, whom I had not seen since the day he held his head in his hands and howled but who was with me every day like the faint image of something warmly pleasant.

  I hid my food below a loose floorboard in the bedroom. This I had pried up with the flat edge of a knife. I found a nail where I could hang the canvas bag by its cord so that it was held below the house in a cool shadow. Then I dropped the board back into place. I thought about the food as if it buttressed me against something I could not name. It made me feel better to think that I had carried my own supplies into the country where I now lived and was not so much at the mercy of those who controlled everything, even where I put my feet. Even the air I breathed.

  The front windows were pearled with rain and the street was dark and watery. The lamplighter did not come this far out from the center of town so our road went dark at dusk and the only light came from the windows of houses. I stood and went to the window and leaned my forehead against the glass. I watched Bertha’s husband drop his suspenders so they hung in loops at his waist. He stretched and sat in his chair and unfolded his paper over his lap. I could smell whatever it was Bertha was cooking for dinner.

  Three nights later, August came home from work. He smiled at me as he came through the door and then he kissed me. I watched him walk into the bedroom, where he dropped his tool belt on the floor. He took the knife out of his waistband and set it on the bedside table. He looked back at me and smiled again and looked at the bed as if I could read his mind. I watched him take two steps toward the basin. I heard the second step squeak. I saw him stop and look down at the floor. I saw him test the floorboard with his toe. He must have felt the board give because he squatted down and touched the edge of the board with his fingertips. He reached behind him for his tool belt and pulled out a screwdriver. He used the point of the screwdriver to pry the board up from the floor. He laid the board beside him. He looked into the darkness under the house. Then he reached down and felt around and pulled my canvas bag out from the shadows. He looked back at me, frowning. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, he’d turned the bag upside down and the contents had rolled out on the wooden floor. Two apples. Three potatoes. The cans of peas and most of the loaf of bread.

  “What is this?” he said.

  “August,” I said.

  “What is this?” he said again, louder. He tossed the sack onto the bed.

  I lowered my head. “Just some food,” I said.

  “Just some food,” he repeated. He picked up one of the potatoes and tossed it from hand to hand. “You keep this for what reason?”

  “To eat.”

  “What?”

  “To eat,” I said. “August.”

  “To eat,” he said.

  I nodded. “Yes,” I said.

  “And this is what you buy with my money? Food you keep from me?” He let the potato drop to the floor.

  “No,” I said. I watched the potato roll under the bed. It seemed unbearable that he would touch what was mine.

  “No?” He kicked the apples and I winced. “You have some other money I do not kno
w about?”

  “I got some from my sister,” I said softly. “August. Please.”

  “You got some money from your sister?”

  “August,” I said.

  “How did you get this money?” he said.

  “She gave it to me.”

  “She gave it to you? Just like that? You did not ask?” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Why would she do that?”

  I wanted to explain but I could not. It seemed too complicated to tell him that I had earned money at the laundry, that my father had always taken that money from me, that I was hungry, that I wanted to eat, that I had walked all the way across town to see if my sister would give me some of that money back, that I did not think I should have to ask him for money, that he was my husband and he was supposed to know enough to take care of me.

  “August,” I said. “It was just a little.”

  “That is a lie.” He ran his hand through his hair. “That is a goddamn lie,” he said. He walked up and down in front of me. “You went begging to your family,” he said. “I have that right, don’t I?”

  “August.”

  “Did she get his permission?”

  “Who?”

  “Your sister. The one you went begging to. Did she get your father’s permission?”

  “It was my money. From before.”

  “But don’t you see what you have done to me?” he said. He tugged at his head as if he could wrench it from his shoulders. “My God,” he said. “My God.”

  “I had to eat,” I said. I looked in his eyes. I could not understand how the act of asking my sister for some of my money back had humiliated him, but I could see that he thought it had.

  “That is when you come to me,” he said. “I cannot read what is in your mind. How do I know anything if you do not tell me?”

  My clothes hung on me like empty sacks. I could count every rib when I lay down next to him. He could have counted my ribs, too, had he ever stopped and looked. Instead, he had simply filled me and filled me again until the hunger turned into my longing for him.

  “You have not given me any money for weeks,” I said.

  “Do I know that?” He looked around the room as if he expected the furniture to answer him. “I do not believe I know that.”

  I had no answer for him. It seemed ridiculous that I should have to tell him to feed me. But August did not think this was ridiculous. He made it seem like I had made a terrible mistake. He made it seem like I should have known what to do.

  He bent down and picked up the floorboard he had pried up with the screwdriver. He threw the board on the bed next to the empty sack. He faced me. “What have you got to say for yourself?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said softly. Pleading. “August—”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Nothing. There is nothing you can say for yourself.” He picked up the sack. “What else do you have in here?” he said. He held the sack upside down in the air before him and shook it up and down as if he expected treasure to drop out. “What else are you hiding from me?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “There is nothing else.”

  He kicked one of my apples and I thought that was a shame because the bruise would spread and I would not be able to eat the apple later.

  He threw the sack at me. “You make me sick.”

  “August,” I said. I stiffened my back. “What do you want me to do? You leave me here with no food, no money. What am I supposed to do?” I crossed the room and touched his forearm. “I have to eat.”

  “Do not do that,” he said.

  “This?” I said. I pressed myself against him. “Don’t do this?”

  “Stop it,” he said. He stepped away. “You humiliated me in front of your family. I don’t want to be near you.”

  “No?” I said. I followed him. “You don’t want this?” I pushed myself against him again. I looked up at him. His face had gone dire in the falling light. “August,” I said. “August.” I lay both of my hands on him. I leaned into him and felt his warm chest beneath my palms. I told him that I loved him. I tried to make him remember who I was. I tried to make him hold me the way he had held me before we were married. I wanted him to feel in his racing heart that we were the same and that he loved me, he loved me.

  “Stop acting like a whore,” he said. He put his hands on my shoulders and tried to push me away. But I held on to his shirtsleeves.

  He raised his hand and slapped me hard across the face. I fell to my knees. Sprays of sparkles stood out before me, white and green and blue, and then came a blow and there was darkness behind the sparkles. I lost sight of the table leg and the foot of the bed. A rushing filled my ears as if the swirling surge of a terrible river and then came another blow and even the river sound retreated. I lay in the blue-black darkness and felt my body move as if I had become a sack of lost and lumpy things. But I did not put my hand up before me. I did not crawl away. After a while I could hear someone far away screaming and then I heard men shouting and someone yelling, “Stop it! You’ll kill her!” After that August leaned down through the blank light and the gray shadow and the blue sparkles and the white sparkles. He put his face close to mine. He put his mouth next to my ear. “Understand me,” he said. “Next time I will use my gun.”

  17

  Bertha’s husband, Frank, and some other men came through the door and pulled August off of me. They lifted me up and carried me across the wet grass to Bertha’s house. She covered me with a blanket. I turned my head and spit blood into the grass.

  The men put me in a bedroom where there was flowered wallpaper on the walls and clean white woodwork and a lamp with a pastel blue glass shade on the nightstand next to the bed. Then the men were gone. Bertha opened the window and no breeze blew the curtains at the sill. I heard her soft footsteps on the stairs. The night was still and hot. Somewhere below me she chipped ice and put the chips in a clean towel and brought that to me and told me to hold it against my jaw. She set a shallow white basin with a rim of red on the nightstand and used both hands to loosen my clothes. She dipped a washcloth into the water in the basin and dabbed at my face. She put a pillow under my arm so I could hold the ice against my jaw. She sat with me for a long time but I was too ashamed to look her in the eye. Then she went away. I lay in the silence and wished I were dead.

  When she came back she carried a vase of dark red dahlias, which she put on the dresser. She had changed from her dress into her nightclothes. She fingered the sash on her wrapper. Her face was weary and sad. I tried to sit up but fell back. Pain shot through my sides, my stomach, my face.

  “Lie still,” she said. Her voice had a firm, commanding quality I had not heard from her before.

  “Where,” I said. I stopped. Shattered stars flew up over me in a dazzling whirl and then darkness followed.

  “Frank took him to get a drink.”

  More stars flew up and faded.

  “It’s bad,” she said. “I should get the doctor.” She touched my face. “You need stitches.”

  “No.”

  “But you could have something broken inside. You look very bad.”

  Blackness rose and then dropped away and the room sparkled. If I had something broken inside, it was because August had broken it. I licked my lips. Blood. It ran down my neck and into my hair.

  “Someone from your family, then,” she urged.

  “No,” I said.

  “Your mother?” Bertha smoothed back my hair. Her touch was gentle. “A sister?”

  Tears ran out of my eyes into my ears. I stared at the ceiling.

  She picked up the washcloth from its basin. She wiped the cloth against my skin. The cloth was cool and wet and she worked gently. Her hair was tied back in a blue ribbon, her robe and nightgown fresh and pressed, her slippers white wool, as if she were a being from a place I had only heard rumored. “Get some rest,” she murmured. The cool wet and the stars in my head. “We won’t let him in tonight.”

  The first night I dreamt of my mother.
She held her hand out to me but I could not reach her. In the morning I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. I thought about the day August and I got married. They all thought I was ruined already so what did it matter what he did with me? The judge had winked at August like a man will when he shares some secret with another. Kiss her, he’d said, as if he did not know what else had already gone on. Martha believed what my father believed, which made her no different from William Oliver or Inge or any of the rest of them. It was as if they had put their heads together about me and taken my measure and then they had marked that down someplace and my future was sealed. As if I had no say in this and no hand.

  Bertha brought a bowl of oatmeal on a tray and set it down on the bedside table. She pulled up a chair. In a kind voice she told me that I should just stay where I was and she would help me eat. She sat there for a time with the spoon poised in midair, but when I would not take anything, she stood up and left. Pain all over my body razor sharp and my ribs hurt like they’d been broken. I lay there and told myself that it would get better. I lay there and cried. When I woke up it was the second day, and Bertha stood in front of me with a soup plate in her hand.

  “You have to eat,” she said. “Let me help you.”

  She had made some broth from beef bones. She sat on the chair and said she could feed me if I wanted but I said no. I dug my elbows into the mattress until I slowly came to a sitting position and stayed like that while white pain shot through me. But I smiled at her and took the bowl. I rested it on a tray she placed across my lap and slowly tasted the soup. Nausea lay below the pain, like a thin cloak that seemed ready to strangle me. But I smiled again and told Bertha that I liked her soup, that it was good.

  She watched me. “It’s not the first time, is it?”

  I set the spoon down on the tray.