And the Dark Sacred Night (28 page)

Matthew was a senior. He smiled or waved whenever they passed between classes, and if she timed it right, she could walk out right behind him at the end of the day. He and Zeke sometimes had one of the farm’s trucks, and they’d give her a lift into town.

Their older brother, Aaron, was up in Burlington, halfway through college. The village hummed that fall with news of his engagement to Dora Keene, whose father ran the Keene Canteen, the sandwich and provisions shop. While waiting for Aaron to return with his degree, Dora waited on her father’s customers: on Aaron and Matthew’s
father, on Lucinda’s father, on teenagers who colonized the counter on Saturdays, drinking shakes made with the foamy, sun-colored milk from Aaron’s family’s well-nourished cows.

The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor that December. Aaron, almost the minute he arrived home for Christmas, enlisted in the army. Matthew vowed that at the end of the school year he would sign up, too. Zeke swore he’d join them the minute he turned eighteen—if his brothers and their friends hadn’t won the war already.

June was a time of sudden exodus: it seemed as if all the boys fresh out of high school were being spirited away en masse. Later that summer, Lucinda ran into Matthew’s mother at the Canteen. Summoning every ounce of courage, she asked Mrs. Burns if she might have Matthew’s mailing address. She wondered if Mrs. Burns looked down on her because she was Catholic, though theirs was a community where how hard you worked mattered much more than where you worshipped. Mrs. Burns told her Matt had written home to say that training was tough. Never having been away from the farm for more than a few days, he was pretty homesick. “I’d say the postmark alone will cheer him up,” she told Lucinda as she wrote the address on the back of a coupon.

Address in hand, Lucinda walked straight to Saint Joseph’s to pray for the safe return of both Burns boys and to confess her less-than-chaste feelings toward the one whose heart she was determined to secure. She wrote to him that evening; within two weeks, she had a reply. He asked about her rabbits, her parents, the weather. Was his little brother, that chowderhead, keeping up with the haying? What he’d give to have been there for the Fourth of July parade! (He would have driven the tractor pulling the wagon with the 4-H float; Zeke had taken his place.) Had Lucinda saved a program from the concert on the green? Could she send it along?

Her heart felt as if it had rocketed to heaven, then drifted back to reside in her chest. She went to the backyard and hugged her rabbits. She would show two of them at the fair in August. If she won a ribbon, she’d send it to Matthew. What if she bought him a Saint Christopher medal; would that be too bold?

She wondered if he would have to fight. Older girls bragged about what heroes they knew their boyfriends would be. They’d mow down
the Nips and the Huns as sure as they knew how to mow down corn and hay. Lucinda didn’t care if Matthew came back a hero. She just wanted him to come back alive. Was it insolent to ask this of God?
Matthew Burns, Matthew Burns, Matthew Burns
, she murmured in private, the syllables like beads on a rosary, the name a prayer in itself. Matthew Elijah Burns would come home from war, go to college, then come home again and marry Lucinda Margaret James. Where they lived was of no importance; let Aaron and Dora take over Sanctuary Farm. She and Matthew could have their own farm; a house in town; a hut by the river. Lucinda would never love anyone, she swore, as much as she loved Matthew Burns.

She wakes with a sore neck, her left arm numb. It took hours for her to fall asleep, the bars of the sofa bed’s frame palpable through the skimpy mattress; she will never subject another guest (another welcome guest) to a night like that. She gets up and uses the washroom off the kitchen that was once used by the hired hands before the midday meals that Zeke’s mother cooked for a dozen men.

She’ll get the coffee going, then check on Zeke. The percolator parts are still in the dishwasher. She will have to devise a new routine, make as many preparations as possible in advance. Everything will take more time.

Jasper Noonan, she thinks. Speaking of time, she must somehow carve out enough of it to call him today. She’ll call while David is here. (If she were Zeke, she would ask David to Google Jasper Noonan before returning the call.)

When Lucinda goes into the living room, she sees Zeke lying on the rug next to the hospital bed. “Oh God!” she cries out and kneels beside him. “Zeke!”

He opens his eyes and stares at her blankly for a moment.

“Are you all right? Did you fall?” The bed’s guardrail is down.

He frowns at Lucinda. “Washleep.”

“I see that now, but you gave me a heart attack. Did you try to get up by yourself? I left you the bell, to call me.”

“Shridiculish.” He turns slowly until he’s lying flat on his back, staring at the ceiling. “Whole thing ushurd.”

“I know it is, Zeke. But, please, can we get you up here, just to the chair? If you let me lift your shoulders …”

He winces and crosses one leg over the other. That’s when she notices that his pajama bottoms are wet.

The phone rings. Struggling to rise, she thinks, I am way too old for this.

“Mom? Did I wake you? I have a superlong day and I wanted to catch you. Between classes and office hours, I am totally unreachable today.”

“No, Jonathan, we’re awake.”

“Is everything okay? Is he okay?”

“He’s lying in the middle of the living room floor right now, staring at the ceiling. But he’s fine.” She knows that her telling this to Jonathan will annoy Zeke and get him to move. Or so she desperately hopes.

“I wanted to tell you I’m coming out a few days early.”

“What’s that, sweetheart?”

“A colleague will cover the lecture I’d miss. I’ve got papers coming in from my seminar students, but they get turned in by e-mail these days, so I can read them just as easily out there. So here’s the plan: Cyril and I will do all the cooking. Are Teeny’s girls coming? Maybe we should do the meal at her house? We’re totally flexible, Mom. You call the shots.”

Lucinda carries the phone into the living room, where she can keep an eye on Zeke. Unkindly, she thinks of the urine sinking into the Chinese carpet. She will have to look for that pet deodorizer spray they used when Jethro was old and arthritic, too weary to bother with going outside. (Zeke loves being greeted by a dog when he comes home, but thank heaven they hadn’t replaced Jethro yet. Debilitated husband plus puppy: imagine!)

Zeke’s eyes are closed, arms at his side. But for the regular movements of his chest, he looks like a corpse.

“Jonathan, Thanksgiving was the furthest thing from my mind.”

“Mom, it’s in less than two weeks, and no way are we going to skip it. How about you leave it all to us? I made a reservation for me and Cyril at that great B and B. Let us be your slaves. You can kick us out whenever you need to.”

“That’s so generous, sweetheart. But please stay here. I always like having you here.”

“Are you okay, Mom? I mean, are you managing?”

“Honey, I have enough help for the time being. This place is going to be like a hive today. It will be good to see you whenever you can come.”

“Next Saturday,” he says. “I’ll be your slave for a solid week. How’s that? Cyril can make it on Tuesday. He’s going on to Boston for a Hawthorne symposium, so it works out perfectly.”

Jonathan and Cyril—the man she is now accustomed to thinking of as her second son-in-law—are tenured professors at Berkeley, Jonathan in gender studies, Cyril in American literature. (Their two most recent books—Jonathan’s
Sexual Identity in Firstborn Children
and Cyril’s
The Fine Hammered Steel of Woe: Ecclesiastes and Melville’s Ambivalent Soul
—sit on her bedside table, beneath others she is far more likely to read.)

Zeke is now struggling to rise. “Raaaahg!” he bellows, walruslike.

“Is that
Dad
?” Jonathan sounds horrified.

“I have to go. I’ll call you later—tomorrow. We’re doing fine, sweetheart. I love you.” She hangs up.

Lucinda drags one of the armchairs over to help Zeke pull himself up. She braces the walker against the chair. “We have to get you to the bathroom, get you dressed. And I know you don’t like it, but you’ve got to let me help.”

“Pished onnarug like a dog.”

“Well, yes,” says Lucinda. “You did.” She hopes he’ll laugh. She hasn’t seen him laugh once since the stroke. Zeke is a man with a hearty, charming, persuasive laugh. (Can a stroke knock out the specific zone in your brain that generates laughter?) He doesn’t even smile. All right, he’s in a rage. The doctor warned her that this would be a normal reaction for a man accustomed to Zeke’s level of activity and control.

With the help of the walker, she guides him to the larger bathroom for guests, off the front hall, but there isn’t enough space for both of them and the walker. She leaves him there so she can go upstairs and get him clothes. At the rehab center, Zoe made Lucinda practice undressing and redressing her husband. Zeke made Zoe leave the
room. They worked in embarrassed silence, Zeke refusing to let her take off his undershorts.

When she returns, Zeke has locked the door and won’t let her in.

“Zeke, I have your clothes. You’re going to freeze.”

The door opens a few inches. One hand, shaky, clawlike, emerges: an image from a horror movie. “Giff me clojsh.”

She hands him his boxers, then his trousers, then a shirt. She says, “You’re going to need my help, especially with the buttons,” but the door closes.

Through the tall windows flanking the front door, Lucinda sees an unfamiliar car pull up. It’s already nine-thirty, and she’s still in her nightgown.

Zoe approaches the house and, catching sight of Lucinda inside, waves.

When Zoe comes in, she wipes her feet with the same enthusiasm she applies to her difficult work. She hangs her yellow down jacket on the coat rack, looks Lucinda over, and shakes her head. “Rough morning.”

Zoe is small and wiry, astonishingly strong; Lucinda has seen her lift Zeke from a fall, supporting his entire weight. Her hair is dyed albino blond, a color defiantly incongruous with her dark eyebrows and cinnamon-colored skin. Lucinda imagines her growing up as the lone little sister to a pack of brothers who brought her up scrappy and resilient but confident, too. She radiates the contagious calm of someone who’s well and widely loved.

“He’s in the bathroom,” says Lucinda. “He won’t let me dress him.”

“That’s your husband all right.” Zoe calls out, “Hey, Zig, it’s me—Zag. Holler if you need me. We got our work cut out for us today!” She turns back to Lucinda. “You go get dressed—no hurry. Have breakfast in peace. Read the paper or just chill. Chillax, as my ten-year-old loves to say.”

Lucinda, unlike Zeke, is happy right now to have someone order her around. Chillax, she thinks. She will do her best. But first, she’ll dress herself.

The things we take for granted, she muses sadly as she hooks her bra behind her back, a daily act she hasn’t consciously registered for years. What if she, too, were to have a stroke, lose the ability to do
so much as button a blouse? She thinks of their collective fate in the hands of their two surviving children, Christina and Jonathan. How long before she and Zeke are both consigned to a nursing home, however deluxe?

For the past few days, the morning light in the bedroom has startled Lucinda, as it does every year when snow arrives. The deep drifts left by the unexpectedly early blizzard still cover the fields, their milky radiance filling the upper rooms of the house, lending the white walls a pristine eggshell luster. Beautiful light, beautiful views—but waiting for the plow to get her out had been unnerving. At least the phone lines had held through the storm. She was able to call Zeke at the center, assure him she was fine.

From the window in her dressing room—the room where Zeke’s mother kept all three of her sons as newborns—Lucinda has a head-on view of the long lane connecting the house to the road. When she was a young bride, she drove the length of it several times a week, visiting her in-laws for dinners, attending church fund-raisers. Dutch elms, planted in two perfect colonnades, enclosed the lane, their supplicant branches interlacing overhead. By late June, the glossy foliage formed a tunnel of cool moist air; to the younger Lucinda, entering that tunnel stirred up restive, conflicting emotions.

All the elms—all fifty-eight, though no one had bothered to count them before—died of beetle blight in the early sixties, soon after she moved into the house. From this window, she saw them wither and succumb. No amount of money or horticultural expertise could save them. Removing the stumps cost a fortune. The lane remained barren, the timothied meadows lapping thirstily along its bermed edges, until a few years ago, when Zeke decided to plant rows of a specially grafted disease-resistant maple (for now the maples are threatened by yet another blight). The new trees are still tentative and spindly, but last summer they leaped in height, and a month ago they blushed dramatically, the leaves on their young limbs flushing a regal, violet shade of crimson.

She wishes she could go for a long walk; it’s time to get out her snowshoes. Walking a good distance, alone, always cheers her up, sets her right. But solitary luxuries must wait.

A delivery van turns down the lane. Not until it steers onto the loop in front of the porch does Lucinda recognize the logo of the village
florist. “Fiddle.” She sighs. Bring on the parade of floral tributes. Zeke will rage at this, too.

As Lucinda rushes downstairs, hoping to reach the door before the bell rings, she catches sight of Zeke, now dressed, in the living room with Zoe. She’s brought her “toys”: the massive rubber ball, the thick elastic bands, the Gumby-like gizmos that strengthen hands and feet.

Lucinda signs for the flowers quickly, making no small talk. Gladiolas, the funeral flower.
To our champion and friend: We pray daily for your speedy recovery!!! With affection and blessings, Father Jess and the staff of St. J’s
.

Lucinda laughs. Ecumenically tolerant though he may be in public, in private Zeke rails openly against the backward teachings of the Catholic Church and the harm it has done to the world’s poorest peoples (that plural an irritation to Lucinda, a sign that he’s a politician down to the marrow, even in his kitchen, alone with his wife).