by Jeffrey Lent
“Oh Lord,” she said, speaking not he felt so much to him as out into the space around her, as if it were not vacant but filled up, peopled. “Ain’t hurting nobody, ain’t hurting nobody no more. Can’t be done, can’t do worse. All I do is hold on tight and not hurt nobody. You got no idea. You can’t even begin. You know it and I know it too; Lord Jesus and his Father they got more in mind than little piddly you and me and what we like or can’t stand. I was lifted up, thought I was lifting myself, dropped down longside you thinking I’d been made new. No not made. Given. Thought it was what, salvation? Reward? No. No, no. I wasn’t never that stupid. Thought maybe it was the chance to do right, do good, do what I could all my own. Thought that was enough. Thought that was a blessing. Didn’t think it so much as knew.
“There was a before and after. One time, one place, one me. Another time, another place, some other me. Stupid bitch. That’s what you ended up with. Stupid bitch. Don’t go feeling sorry for yourself. Don’t shrink from the truth, Norman. Stand up to it like a man and stand there, watch it tear you down, bit by piece. Like them old stone buildings blasted by the sword. I always saw that happening like a thunderclap, lightning strike. But you know something? It wasn’t never one like that I bet. It was all that fine old rough stone falling apart crumble by crumble, each little chip torn off by some fool passing by. Not even knowing they doing it, all wrapped up in theirselves. Not even notice the dust and chips fall behind they pass. That’s how it is. That’s all they is.” Her eyes still closed.
He crossed to her now, his boots inches from her shoes. He did not trust himself to bend and touch her. He wanted to strike her, smack the side of her face. Open her eyes. Make her open her eyes. His voice soft like cat’s-paws, he said, “It can’t be as bad as you make it. All pent up, that’s half of it. Or more than half. You got to tell me. You tell me about it, it won’t be as bad as you think.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him, briefly. Then cut her eyes to the same window he’d looked out earlier. “Trouble with you Norman is you ain’t got the nerve to tell how you feel. Or see how things are. You think it’s all just you and me. It ain’t that at all. It’s people after people, each one nothing to the next. You don’t care bout me Norman, you care bout you. Even them children you worked up over, that’s all just cause they look to you. Otherwise, they some children over the hill somewhere, you wouldn’t care nothing. Don’t rile on me, you know it’s true. Man, woman, we all just a fake thing. Carry on, great importance, nothing. Simple as that. Nothing but grime under some other body’s toeprint. Nothing but waste. Everthing, it come down to nothing. Nothing at all. We just fools, otherwise. Old brother Jesus, maybe even He the biggest fool. Maybe took Hisself a little too serious. Maybe His Father, He still sitting holding His head in His hands over what a fool His son was. Maybe He don’t even care about what we all think, He so caught up in grief over how His child turned out. You ever consider that? You look at it that way, you got to wonder. How else could it be?”
Norman said, “Shut up with that. Shut that kind of talk.”
She perked. “What talk that be? You Jesus working on you?”
He turned without even thinking he was doing it and swept a blue milk-glass vase with a single clump of late-season asters to the floor. The glass shattered fine and disappeared against the carpet but for the small spread stain of water. Here and there in the stain the late-afternoon light caught reflection, shards invisible, fine slivers to work deep into the hard callus of a bare foot. Her eyes glittered as if struck by the glass.
She said, “Oh. Nigger talk. That what you mean, ain’t it? Nigger talk.”
He stood over the stain, his boots planted wide, his voice a great labor as if under a lost freshwater sea. “Your pain delights you, delights you more knowing I can’t understand, you knowing that before you even try. And you sit there, carrying the burden, to keep us all safe. Now what I see, it’s as if that pain owned you. As if it had made you its own. Everything else is you just fooling you. Nobody else. That’s all.”
She nodded as if understanding. Then her voice pitched to the familiar, the first time he’d heard it in weeks, said, “Well, Norman. You married me. Cheap little rings in a midnight river and nothing better. Cause you too much a coward to do more. But me, I don’t hold that against you. You knew what you was getting. Nigger girl, nigger woman. Right through, all the way. You done yourself proud. Even if you don’t know nothing. But that ain’t your fault. I mean, I coulda told you, but then, why you listen? I don’t know nothing more than you. Never did, never will. But, Norman, tell me this. You think you was marrying a white woman? You think I was gonna be a white woman someday?”
He stood on the carpet. Before the front drape of the sofa, just beside her left foot, lay the thick bottom of the vase, lying on its side, flanges of glass extending each separate and fragile, as an ill-made crown. He stepped forward so he was far up over her and looked down at her, waiting for her to look up, knowing his bulk could not be ignored, not then. After a time she did. Her eyes wide, wet, shining. Without fear at all. Almost calling for pain from him. Or something he could not read, could not understand. And hated her for this. He reached his right boot forward then and slowly brought it down on the glass, grinding the boot. The glass fell apart slowly, the dry sound of it the only one in the room. Then his bootsole scrubbed hard into the carpet. He did not look down, at the floor or the woman. He walked to the door and turned back only when he was already through it, holding it back from closing behind him. He said, “I know who I married. Always have. Self-pity’s a terrible thing. I never thought to see it in you.” And let the door close.
In the kitchen their elder daughter and son stood, backed against the sink, Jamie with his head turned into Abby’s skirts, his face buried against her thigh, his hands clenching the fabric in strained bunches. Abby held a small basket of windfalls against her other thigh, the apples pocked with rust but firm, hard, the color of dried blood. Her eyes wide upon him, hard dark nuggets of confusion and fear. And some wild elation. He passed them without speaking, feeling the heat of his face, not wanting to stop moving or try to speak, not wanting them to see him trembling. He went on through the entryway and outside. Went to the barns and sat and smoked a bitter pipe. Knowing he had lost an argument, one with a form and function unknown to him. He fed his animals and did his chores. Prudence arrived home from school and wordless, joined him. He felt her watching him and did not speak. Together they went in the dusk to the house and he sat in the kitchen with his children to eat a supper. Leah had gone to bed. Later when he went up he found her sleeping deeply, on her side, her breathing a deep rhythm almost not there. He lay beside her a long while. Once she murmured in her sleep and he leaned close to hear what she would say but she was silent. He lay on his back, up against the headboard, and reached one hand and laid it on her jutted hip. After a time he slept.
Three weeks later on a drear November morning of drizzling low sky she dressed in workaday clothes and took herself up through the sheep pastures beaten down by frosts and into the woods to the spot where the granite outcroppings were jagged upthrusts with sodden moss-backs slick to a bootheel, the rocks overhung by a pair of ancient scarred maples, the northern one that marked a boundary line for the farm running back to the original deed with the same tree, and there with a length cut from the coil that Norman turned into lead-ropes and rope halters for the horses hanged herself with a simple slip knot run up to the maple limb above and a second slip knot for her own neck before stepping off the rock. She left a couple of feet of slack, enough for a hard jerk, and although her side was smeared with moss and mud where she slapped against the granite her hands were clean as if even in the last brief spasmodic effort her body continued to obey her will.
He found her midafternoon. He knew her absence in early morning, knew it was all wrong but felt hampered, harnessed by her two months’ distance. He fretted through to noon, his heart a black node in his chest, a swollen painful thin
g. There was a moment, climbing down a ladder from the hayloft into the sheep pens when he lost himself, was overcome, dizzy, nauseated, his eyes dazzled with floating motes of light against a red field. Later he would conclude this was the moment she stepped free of the rock. He’d been forking down hay through the trapdoors and it was sometime then that he’d determined to search after her and perhaps it was nothing more than his rushing with resolution through the job and then too fast down the ladder. Still, there would forever be that long moment he clung to the simple rungs built into the barn wall, sick, weak and blind.
There was no trail to follow in the soaked November fields and then the woods, all dead flattened grass and leaf-litter already sinking into itself toward decay, toward humus, and he needed none. He knew where to find her, and he climbed up through the misting rain and as he went higher the dropped clouds, passing through ghost-boles of trees with their stripped heads waving slowly in the rocking air, those heads denuded and lost in the cloud come down to earth.
He had brought her here that first fall after the war, before even his mother had moved herself and his sister off the farm, climbing up here, Leah following Norman’s extended long stride, chasing after him. He carried a basket dinner of sandwiches made of cold beans and bacon and sliced onion, apples, a piece of cheese the white of the moon and a jug of fresh cider just starting to harden. Behind the granite boulders was a spring, a stream-head; sunken earth around a clear pool with beds of ferns upright around it as if trying to hide the sweet water. In the center of the pool bubbles rose slowly and whole, to pock the surface as they broke, new water and ancient air rising from the earth. And they came here and ate their dinner, sharing an apple with carved cheese and then crushed the sweet ferns into the moist soil around the pool. And had come times after that. And then, without speaking of it, had stopped coming. As if each trip there diminished the strength and clarity and pureness of the original. Norman recalled lying on his back in the ferns, wetted with a sheen of exertion head to toe after that first time, the old maple-head rocking overhead in a wind he couldn’t feel and knowing as absolute fact that something of his father squatted on haunches in the woods above and watched them, intent, approving. He knew that as sure as he knew she was all he would ever need.
No sound came from him that he would ever remember when he cleared the last ridge and came into the boulder field and saw her, an object off the ground, peaceful, not moving, her head tipped down to rest against one shoulder. The mist was not rain then, just wet air streaming against him, wet air that he moved through. The dormant woods, the tree bark, the clotted leaf-duff, the moss on stones, the texture of the stones’ surfaces: all were bright-colored with the wet, each texture distinct, separate. As if to prove the relentlessness of life. Red and mustard-yellow lichens, bright as stains. The warning bark of a squirrel. Her clothing was soaked dark with water and her skin was the dull purple of blackberries dried on the stem with August sun. Going toward her, he could not hold breath. He was wildly angry with his sobbing, a mean, puny indulgence before the sight of her. Nearer, she stank of feces and urine. He took her waist and lifted her with one arm and sawed at the wet rope with his pocketknife and could not cut it. The knife was dulled. He’d not owned a dull knife in his life. He tried again and she turned against him and her face fell against the top of his head and he could not cut the rope. Finally he climbed the stone beside where she swung and took the rope in a hard turn over his elbow and held her weight and gazed off at the higher part of the maple trunk as he reached high and slowly cut it through. Then lowered her to the ground, as close as the short rope would allow. The rope end went through his hands and she dropped and lay crumpled, folded over herself. He slid down the rock face after her and picked her up and cradled her against him, her face now against his, her body held to him. He took her down the hill.
After the graveside service, when the pine box Norman had built and sanded and polished through one entire night was lowered by ropes into the earth and the Congregational minister said his last few spare words, Norman bent and took up the first handful of clumped wet soil and dropped it onto the box where it made a hollow sound loud to the hushed craned necks. Norman stood then at grave edge, wavering a moment, studying the spread clot on the honeyed wood before he turned and took up the spade and drove it deep into the mound that seemed so much greater than the small hole it had made. At the moment that he flung down the first spadeful and swung back toward the pile, his body absorbing the job of work to be done, Jamie broke free from where he’d stood framed by both sisters, a small still figure near alone but for some cousins opposite the grave amongst the adults. Jamie appeared to see no one around him throughout the brief reading of the twenty-third psalm, but at the moment his father took up the spade the boy saw his father’s face black and sagged with anger and grief and tore his hands from his sisters and fled. For a brief moment the family, the minister, Connie and Glen and their children, the small number of neighbors and village tradespeople, the even smaller number of veterans, all lifted their heads from the coffin in the hole and watched the slight figure tear raging across the hillside slope away from the burying plot, his arms flailing for balance in the tight black suit, his voice one long endless wail of rage coming back to them in the still air. The sun was shining on them all, a pale washed thing before the stiffened chill wind out of the northwest.
Norman looked after his boy, then at his daughters. They looked one to the other and did not speak. Abby reached quickly to take and drop her sister’s hand and then turned and walked without haste after her brother already gone from sight down over the hill. As if she knew she had to find him and knew also it would do no good. She stepped through the gap in the stone wall enclosure of the dead. There was no gate, only an opening with a pair of flanking upright granite posts with old holes drilled into them for a gate long since rotted away. The sheep grazed summers between the blackened granite stones. Off in the southeast corner an old rose had grown wild, now a thicket of bare canes crabbing together in the wind. Above the plot in the edge of the sugarbush a hundred or so crows had chosen the afternoon to caucus, their cries brilliant, jagged in the air, pitched as if to lift the short hairs on the backs of necks, the flesh on the arms, of the people gathered below. Norman watched Abby until she dropped bit by bit from sight on the incline down to the farm. He did not wait for her to come back into sight in the farmyard. He didn’t look at the people around him. He turned back to his shovel. But the moment offered by his son had stopped everything in him and he bent to his work with the clear notion that this was the job of his life, that everything else had only one way or another pointed him to this. He shoveled easily and slowly now, not wanting it to end.
They filed down the hillside following Norman and Prudence, the sky hazing so the sunlight fell on them with the vapid color of old beech leaves, the wind up. In the house they stood in random odd clumps and pairings, standing up eating off plates of the funereal food carried in on platters and in canning jars and beanpots and baskets of baked goods wrapped in clean toweling. The minister, his slender work done here, stood in a corner leaning over his cupped plate like a palm tree, his hair windblown, leaving his skull shining as if polished. Norman sat at the table in the kitchen with his children, drinking coffee. Abby had Jamie on her lap, one of her hands running constant back over his face with a damp cloth napkin. He’d sobbed and screamed himself into a narcosis of grief. Norman had looked at him and at Abby and back to the boy and Abby shook her head and he nodded at her. She’d tell him later. People drifted through the kitchen to lean and speak to Norman and the girls. He watched their mouths move and their faces work and did not understand them and so mostly nodded and took offered hands, trying not to watch their eyes, loaded as they were with stark strata of pity, dread, surprise, animation and fear. Connie came, finally it seemed, and pulled a chair close to tell him she’d take Jamie for a couple of weeks.
“No. But thank you. I want us all together.”
“Think it through, Norman. You can’t understand him right now anymore than these girls can. Or me. He’s got three cousin boys all ages surrounding him and those four can parse death in ways none of the rest of us can begin at. I’m not offering you anything; it’s him I’m thinking of. What he needs right now is diversion and people that speak his own language and he’s not going to get any of that in this house for the time being.”
“I’ll not turn from him for convenience. His mother would not forgive me.”
“There. You’ve made my point.” Her eyes on him were delicate, bright-veined, dry. “Her forgiveness isn’t something to be concerned with.”
“He won’t want to go.”
“What he wants right now he can’t have anyway.”
“That’s cruel.”
“Norman. I’m the least cruel person you’ll ever know in your life.” Then she paused and he saw the hurt smirch her face. She said, “I never once truly doubted you Norman but this time I know best.”
And he turned away from her, the intent and focus in her too bright to believe, all that lost to him. And turned to see Abby gazing wide-eyed at him and then to Prudence with her swollen face squirmed up with pain and through this she was nodding at him. He turned back to his sister. “All right then. A week, ten days. If he wants home before then, you’ll bring him.”
She nodded and laid her hand on his arm. People were leaving, and he wanted them gone. Wanted the house empty, wanted the quiet for the vacuum of his heart to spread out and join together with that other vacuum cringing back already and always in the shadows and corners of the rooms, wanted this last marriage of solitude opened to him, not to dwell in grief or memory but to live within what was there now: the vast array that he believed would number his days in a polarity to those of his life ended when she cut the length of rope, when she took the train home, when Marthe Ballou was murdered. When she stepped off the granite.