Some Wildflower In My Heart (48 page)

Whether Thomas was resigned from the outset to the terms of our marriage—that is to the absence of a physical union as I had specified—or whether he hoped that I would relent over the course of time, I do not know. Though at first I regarded him with wariness, he never trespassed the boundaries that I had specified nor requested, by word or act, a renegotiation of the spoken contract.

On the day after the Freemans ate supper with us, as I watched Thomas sitting in his recliner before the television, strange, unsettling thoughts suffused my mind. It was astonishing to me, when I paused to think of it, that in all of my reading of contemporary fiction, I could not recall such a marriage as ours. I had read, of course, of spouses who over the passage of difficult years had become alienated from each other and had ceased all physical relations, but of marriages initiated as business partnerships and thereafter conducted as such, I could call to mind none. Nor was I aware of any such marriages outside the world of fiction—in “real life,” as they say—although I suspect that a great many do exist.

Since my fright en route to the emergency room in October, on the day when Nick Purdue had suffered a stroke, I had become increasingly aware of my—I can think of no better word—
dependence
upon Thomas. It had happened without my taking note. I inventoried his contributions to my life and found them to be many.

On the morning of December 18, I began to wonder how Thomas felt about our marriage. I began to wonder whether he ever imagined the two of us engaged in easy banter, whether he ever wished to touch me. I worried that our friendship with Birdie and Mickey would only serve to engender within him a longing for what he did not possess, that is, the unreserved devotion and cheerful camaraderie of his wife. I worried that already he had wistfully observed Birdie and Mickey's relationship and had wished for the same.

As Thomas watched two professional wrestlers pretend to pummel each other, I prepared for myself a cup of tea and sat in my rocking chair to read the Filbert
Nutshell
. We sat scarcely three feet apart, each absorbed in his own diversion. After several minutes I turned to the obituary page and saw that a former member of the school board had died: Ross Bertram Honeycutt. His age was reported as seventy. My immediate thought was
Thomas is seventy
.

I glanced across at Thomas, but his attention was riveted upon the television screen. Though I had read the obituary page countless times before this and had taken regular note of the ages of the deceased, I had never before felt such a shudder of apprehension descend upon me as I made the transfer between such information and my own husband. It was as though I heard a pronouncement of doom—“
Thomas will die”
—followed by another—“
You will die.”
Though I tried to lay it to the account of my pessimistic bent, I was nevertheless distraught. The thought of losing Thomas troubled me deeply. I raised the newspaper higher so that I could not see him. But I found myself once again staring at the picture of Ross Bertram Honeycutt on the obituary page of the Filbert
Nutshell
and heard once more the whispered judgment:
“Thomas will die.”

By this time, Thomas had stirred from his recliner. He turned off the television and walked to the front door, turning back to say, as was his Sunday custom, “I'll be back in time for dinner.” Then he closed the door, descended the front steps, and backed out of the driveway in his truck. Almost every Sunday afternoon since we were married he has gone to the hardware store to play cards in the stock room with Norm and two other cronies. I do not pry into his business and have never had cause to suspect him of gambling or drinking during these interludes. I have never smelled anything stronger than peanuts on his breath when he comes home.

I laid the newspaper on the footstool in the living room, and for the first time in the fifteen years of our marriage I walked into Thomas's bedroom with no specific mission in mind. I was not fetching coats for guests; I had no shirts to hang in his closet, no clothes to put away in his bureau drawers, no dust rag in my hand.

The thought came to me that perhaps worrying was an auspicious sign, for in my lifetime I had worried only when buoyed by hope. When one's existence is without hope, there is little cause to worry. I had worried as a child, for my mother had instilled within me a sense of apprehension concerning strangers. I flinched at every knock upon the door and clasped my mother's hand fearfully when we moved about the city.

On the other hand, I had not worried when living in my grandfather's house. I came to see his abuses as inevitable. Worrying about them made no difference in their regularity. I existed as if drugged.

When I ran away from Marshland, I worried obsessively, constantly looking backward over my shoulder, walking stealthily even across the floor of my own apartment. Later, as I moved from town to town with Tyndall, I continued to worry lest my grandfather should track us down.

After I lost Tyndall, I no longer worried. Hope had vanished. I ceased to care whether my grandfather traced my whereabouts. Neither did I worry when I returned to my grandparents' house and attended them upon their deathbeds, nor when I moved to Filbert and took up my life there. I did not worry what others thought of me nor of what would become of me. I simply lived from day to day, performing my work and fending off the advances of others with the skill of long practice. I rebuffed even the schoolchildren of Emma Weldy, who soon gave up their efforts at friendliness.

But now I had arrived at this point: I found myself once again fraught with worries. As I stood in the doorway of Thomas's bedroom and looked about, I felt oddly comforted by my worries, as if they were sure mercies that had been awaiting the easement of austere penalties. I stepped into his bedroom and, not knowing what else to do, sat upon the edge of his bed.

I do not know how long it was that I sat upon Thomas's bed that Sunday afternoon and studied every aspect of his bedroom as if for the first time. Though I dusted and vacuumed the room according to an unvarying schedule, I had never remained within its four walls longer than necessary. As I sat upon the blue bedspread that day, I noted signs of wear that had escaped my eye during my cleaning sorties.

The bedspread itself was growing thin from use. The looped fringe along the edges looked ragged as if frequently snagged. The gold braided rug beside the bed had begun to unstitch near the center, and I saw a corkscrew of transparent nylon thread lying loose atop it. The plain dark blue curtains at the windows looked listless from repeated washings. They were the same curtains that I had hung in the room when I first moved into my duplex. The bedside lamp, with its stout wooden base, was purely functional. It had never possessed aesthetic appeal even when new. The lampshade, once a creamy white, had darkened to the color of scorched parchment.

Having no eye for decorating, Thomas had never expressed discontent with his bedroom or its spartan furnishings, although it was he, strangely, who over the years had brought home a number of accessories for other rooms of our duplex: an oak magazine rack, a ceramic urn, a rattan wall shelf, and an Oriental umbrella intended for ornament.

Thomas's bedroom was clean and tidy, for there were no knickknacks to clutter it. As I scanned its length and breadth, however, it came to me that it was a cheerless place to spend one's private hours. There was but a single picture in the room, a large framed print of a Carolina wren upon a dogwood branch, and above the bed hung a gun rack displaying one rifle, which I believe was in working order though, of course, unloaded.

I ran my hand across the raised geometric pattern of the chenille bedspread and wondered whether Thomas had a bedtime ritual. Did he look through back issues of
Field and Stream
before turning out his light? Several were stacked neatly upon his bedside table. Did he plump his pillow? Did he pull the bed covers snugly to his chin, or did he fling them back to sleep unfettered? It struck me that I did not even know whether my husband customarily slept on his back or on his side. Furthermore, it had never occurred to me to
wonder
. Did Thomas fall asleep immediately upon lying down, I wondered now, or did he remain awake, tossing restlessly? If so, what did he think about during the night hours? On the chair beside his bureau I saw the electric heating pad, its cord wrapped neatly around it. Thomas must have used it recently, but why? I wondered whether he had ever gone into my bedroom when I was not at home and sat musing upon my bed as I was doing upon his.

By the time Thomas returned home later that afternoon, I had collected my wits enough to have our Sunday meal ready to serve. Though it had not taken a great deal of effort, the food was tasty and received Thomas's verbal approbation. I had saved the gravy I had served with the pot roast a few days earlier, and to that I had added the roast beef that still remained from what we had used for sandwiches the previous night. I had cut the meat into chunks, stirred it into the gravy, and simmered it slowly. This I spooned over beds of rice as a rich, savory sauce. To complement the main dish, I also served purple hull peas, creamed corn, julienne carrots, baked zucchini sprinkled with basil and parmesan cheese, and sweet muffins.

I attended to Thomas's talk at dinner that day more closely than usual, and I observed him when he was not looking at me. As I have said in an earlier chapter, Thomas is not an unattractive man. He looks a decade younger than his seventy years, carries his height with a natural dignity, and has what has been called a photogenic smile. If he did not speak aloud and if he dressed the part, I suppose he could pass for a veteran politician, even a former president perhaps. He is more handsome than Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, or Richard Nixon but lacks the youthful lines of John Kennedy or Bill Clinton. His looks run more toward those of Ronald Reagan, I suppose, although during the Reagan era Thomas could never reconcile himself to the fact that “a movie actor was runnin' the whole John-Brown country.”

Early in the meal he launched into a tale related to him that afternoon by Ned Boswell, one of his card-playing foursome. It was a farfetched story, a “humdinger” as Thomas called it, involving a dead cat and a shopping bag, and I interrupted him midway, asking, “Did Ned Boswell witness this incident firsthand?”

“Naw, but his next door neighbor said she knew the woman's best friend who it happened to over near Pelzer,” Thomas said. He resumed the story, and I listened to its conclusion, in which an ambulance figured.

“I believe Ned has been taken in by what is known as an urban legend,” I said when Thomas had finished the story.

“A what?” he asked. “What's that supposed to mean? You don't think it's true?”

“I heard Francine tell the same story to Algeria and Birdie two months ago in the school kitchen,” I said. “The only variation in her version was that the final scene took place in a doughnut shop instead of a Chick-Fil-A. According to Francine, her mother heard the story from a man who used to live in Powdersville, whose brother knew the ambulance driver. Moreover,” I added, “after Francine recovered from her fit of giggles at the end of the story, Algeria informed her that her mother had heard the story a year ago from her mailman, who said that his chiropractor told it to him. According to the chiropractor, he saw it happen outside a McDonald's next to a mall. In Francine's story the victim was a white woman, and in Algeria's it was a black man.”

Thomas gaped at me for a brief time and then threw back his head and laughed robustly. “Wait'll I tell Ned!” He laughed again, thumping the table, and then asked, “What's that you call it again?”

“An urban legend.” I then told him in abbreviated form another such story about a man, a cigarette, and a can of hair spray that had been passed around as fact in the Midwest many years ago. It, too, ended with ambulance attendees bearing the hapless man away upon a stretcher. When I was a girl, my mother had told me of hearing the story upon five different occasions, each time in slightly altered form, from persons claiming to have close ties to someone who knew the man.

Thomas pondered this silently for some time. “'Course stories like that could've started out true, you know,” he said. He was slowly peeling the paper from around another muffin, handling it gently, almost admiringly, as if fearful of doing it harm. “It could be a case of passin' somethin' around so much that it just keeps gettin' a little bigger. And then so's he won't sound like a total fool, the feller tellin' it says he heard it from so 'n so, who knew the person—had him over for supper ever' Tuesday or played checkers with him or somethin'.”

I conceded that such might be the case, that were it possible to trace an urban legend to its source, there very likely could be an original anecdote of valid credentials bearing some slight resemblance to the augmented public rendition. “But mankind is seldom satisfied with the plain truth,” I said, and Thomas nodded gravely.

The rest of the meal passed in a routine manner. At five o'clock, after the dishes were washed and put away, Thomas said to me, “Come go with me, Rosie. I want to run over to Derby for just a minute. We won't be gone long.” He was standing in the kitchen doorway, retucking his flannel shirt inside his trousers.

“I have things to do here at home,” I said, and picking up the dishcloth, I wiped the countertop again, although I had already done so three times. The truth was this: Though pleased at the invitation—for Thomas seldom asked me to accompany him anywhere—replying negatively had become such a habit that the words had fallen as if of their own accord.

“Aw, come on, Rosie. You'll like this. It's a new county flea market Norm told me about. They're doin' it just one weekend a month through the winter, but it closes down at six on Sundays. It's indoors at the old fiber mill in Derby. He told me today there's some feller's got a booth with all kinds of tools and car parts for sale.”