The Best American Short Stories 2013 (42 page)

Once his figure was out of sight through the windows, I asked in a low voice after her spirits. She was content to repeat only that she was feeling doleful and unreasonable and unaware of what it was she wished. I asked what it was she then required of me, and she said, responding to my tone, that she wished me to be gentler. I asked again, chastened, what she desired, and she answered that she wanted to lay bare for me all of the hoardings of her imagination. I said nothing. Although I often speak before I think, I can keep still on occasion. She said our kisses had swept through her the way measles had the poor Indians, laying waste to everything. She said she had told herself to abolish all desire for comfort or any sort of happiness and then had immediately abandoned her resolution.

She asked that I speak. I almost cried out, How should I have known what was happening to me? There were no instruction booklets of which I was aware. I told her I could feel something rising in me as she approached, like hair on the back of a dog. I told her the thought of her during the week was my shelter, the way the chickadees took to the depths of the evergreens to keep the snow and ice and wind at bay. I told her that I believed that we were now encountering that species of education that proceeds from being forced to confront what we never before acknowledged.

She asked if we might share some tea and was silent until it was brewed. She said she believed that intimacy increased good will, and that if that were the case, then every moment we spent together would further tie happiness to utility. Wouldn’t our farms benefit from our more joyful labor? Wouldn’t our husbands’ burdens be lightened?

We spent some additional interval thereafter consoling each other. We allowed ourselves some gentle excitement. And after she had departed I looked round the room and thought, “She’s gone and it’s as if she’d never been.”

Sunday 1 April

Warm and windy with the appearance of rain. First day this spring we could go all afternoon without a fire. Fried chicken and potatoes for breakfast. The morning spent manuring the onions.

Dyer took the wagon after breakfast without explanation. My burn seems to be healing poorly. Tallie here earlier than her usual time, and we embraced in the mudroom as if rescued. She mentioned as if in passing that her dog would provide ample notice of arriving friends or strangers. Having done so she led me to our chairs and delivered herself over to our kissing as if it were the most urgent of errands. When I withdrew for breath she kept her face close, describing along my mouth delicate patterns with her tongue. During our longer kisses her breathing grew stronger.

When we separated, we took each other in. Myself, overquiet. Tallie, flushed and on the lookout. Together we made for a distressing pair.

I took her hands and she expressed pain at my sadness. She asked if I’d been to town during the week, and when I told her I hadn’t, she reported that they were cleaning out the drain under the streets along the fork and that several people were down with the fever.

She added that her husband had told her that he didn’t consider that he had a wife, and that he would not lie with a woman if it required a contention. She said that she had informed him that he shouldn’t have anything to do with her; that she was opposed to it; that she was not willing. I was shocked and asked what his response had been. She said he had had no response. I asked if she believed he had given up on the notion of children. She said she had no insights to share on that question.

We were silent for some time, then, out of respect for our predicament. I asked her husband’s age and she said he was nineteen years her senior and had been born in 1811, which would make him forty-five. I asked about his demeanor and she said that as mealtime conversation he had lately begun giving great credit to reports of men living far from town who had worked to poison and thereby kill their wives.

I asked if she really believed he would acquiesce to the notion of no sons. I asked if she believed he resented her visits here with any special fervor, and she said she thought not. We worked ourselves nonetheless into a state of alarm, which was then only assuaged by more embraces and two or three extended kisses of great sobriety.

She admitted to having been at work on another poem, which she had brought to show me, but she allowed me to see only the opening lines, which read:
I love to have gardens, I love to have plants / I love to have air but I don’t love ants
. I told her I could not support the rhyme, which saddened her. She held the poem between us and together we studied it as if it were the incomplete map of our escape route. Finally she said she felt that when she drew near, I would retreat, and when she kept still, I would return but remain at a fixed distance, like those sparrows that will stay in the farmyard but not enter the house. I responded that in her presence I felt perpetually as if I were ready to take her by the hand and lead her to my garden gate and to say: everything in here is yours; come and go and gather as you like.

She also unwrapped from the same packet in which she had secreted the poem a sprig from her favorite cedar, which I told her I would plant where it would forever stay green.

After she left I took myself outside into the sunshine and spread some feed for the surviving chickens. Upon Dyer’s return he found me taking my rest in the shade and kissed me, before withdrawing to refill the water buckets. After a dinner of duck and beets and sweet potatoes we enjoyed some little company together.

Sunday 8 April

Very damp, cloudy, and cool. Smoky. Perhaps the forest is somewhere on fire. A breakfast of hotcakes and custard and pickled peaches. Dyer seems now quite worn down at bedtime with grievance and care. We fear his cough is producing a decline. A syrup of old wine, flaxseed, and a medicinal called Balsom of Life seems to have helped. This morning he made me a trellis for the lima beans and shot a crow and filled it with salt to be hung in the shed over the corn to warn off others of its kind. The whole house seems both angry and repentant. God help us.

No word from Tallie. At midday I stood off the back porch in the sun, my face turned in her direction. Above me a circling hawk used a single cloud as his parasol.

Sunday 15 April

Rain in torrents nearly all night. The lane is flooded and the ditches brim full. This morning only a slight shower.

A breakfast of oatmeal alone. Prepared the pea sticks for the first crop of peas and drowned the barn cat’s kittens. The new wheat because of the holes in our fencing is still exposed to the hogs, which we have driven out several times already. We keep identifying new holes, which we cannot adequately repair for lack of time. Thus we find our enterprise sinking, level by level.

A dispute with Dyer over the windows, open vs. shut. Unable to sit still afterward. Our quarrels always throw me out of harness. How many are there that have a happy fireside? Broad is the gate that leads to dissatisfaction and many wander through. Such is the effect of absence from what we love. But I have always been morose. My mother used to call me her rain crow, because she said time with me was like standing in an endless drizzle.

After Dyer retired I took his spyglass and crossed the fields in the darkness to Tallie’s farm, approaching the front windows of her home as close as I dared and fixing through the kitchen glass, after some patient searching, her motionless figure in relief against the darkness within. Her features were still. By turning the lens-piece I drew her face nearer to mine and held it there until she turned away. Could I have been seen from the inside? I felt a giddiness like the violence of the impulse that sends a floating branch far out over a waterfall’s precipice before it plummets. Her dog’s barking drew her husband out onto the porch and I made my way back, plunging in over my boots in the mud.

At sunset, earlier, a good three minutes of the honking of mallards, winging their way northward. By what faith do they arrive at their destination? I imagine them alighting at some marshy pond, where one by one their scattered kind arrives in safety, there to be together.

A terribly bad spring so far but the clover has come up through it all and is all right.

Sunday 22 April

Finally a glimpse of her after three weeks of no word. She and her husband stopped their wagon outside our house to invite us to dinner this Saturday next. They were on their way again before Tallie and I could exchange much more than a look. The Nottoways report that our hogs have continued to stray into their fields, as well, and threaten increasingly harsh measures against them, including putting out their eyes and driving them into the river. The cardinals are enjoying the hornbeam and the catkins on the birches. The female seems to prefer feeding on the ground.

Cool, but warm enough for no fire in the sitting room.

Sunday 29 April

Rain all week long, so heavy that it broke down the mill. All of our ditches are running to overflow. The lower clover field is swamped.

Two of our hogs are still loose, since they are ailing and Dyer believes a hog is a good doctor and can cure himself if he can find the medicine he needs.

For dinner Saturday night Tallie served us ham, beef, duck, potatoes, beets, pickled cucumbers, biscuits, and cornbread. We commended her on her labor and her husband said that he recalled a day when every family was fed, clothed, shod, sheltered, and warmed from the products a wife gathered from within her own fence line. I said that it must have been two full days that Tallie had spent on this feast, and she responded that her mother had always said that the week’s end was always the hardest part of the week.

Her husband while we ate offered up what news had lately occurred. We were all uneasy to find him so voluble. He mentioned that the Mannings’ third daughter was now one week old. He said that old Mr. Holt had apparently by some means pitched himself forward out of his cart, which had then passed over his back with its load of five hundred pounds, and that because of the mud the doctor says he is not severely hurt. He said that he had heard, when examining the damage at the mill, of news from Middleburgh: that a man down there had of last week been admitted to jail for shooting his wife in the face.

There were silences. Tallie seemed to be keeping strict custody of her eyes. I remarked upon the duck and the men discussed for an interval the old shovel plow, which Dyer compared to dragging a cat by the tail. I marveled at the size and power of their hanging lamp, and Tallie answered that it was eighty candlepower and that she had induced her husband to purchase it so that everyone could read with equal ease all around the room. Finney said that he believed that even if he had been brought up not to read overmuch, he should give his children every chance to do so.

The rain came under discussion. Finney said that no matter what misfortunes arrived at his doorstep, he would seek improvement of his lot with his own industry; he would study his options closely and attend to everything to which he’d believed he had already adequately attended, but with more vehemence. Dyer commended him and reminded the table that when success comes, someone is working hard. Finney said as an example that when he’d first begun farming he’d been so vexed by his inability to stop his dog’s barking one January that during a storm he’d held the animal around the corner of his barn in a gale until it had frozen to death.

I replied after a moment that I found that reprehensible, but he seemed not to hear. I felt sure I was white as a sheet. I could see from Tallie’s face that she’d heard this story before. He held forth to Dyer about his hinged harrow, complaining that the spikes that caught the rocks and roots were forever breaking. He told Tallie, once he saw that we had finished eating, to bring the dessert, and I said we were stuffed and she said that he insisted on his pastries and preserved fruits and creams, and rose to clear the table and fetch them. I excused myself to assist her, and in the kitchen I asked in a whisper about her situation and she shushed me with a shake of her head. I asked after a bruise on her neck and she said she’d taken a fall over the fence. I answered with some petulance and anxiety that I hadn’t heard, and she responded that many things had happened to her about which I hadn’t heard.

Back at table her husband’s mood seemed to have darkened. He served the pastries and fruit and creams himself, leaving only her plate empty. “Is your wife being punished?” Dyer joked. And when Finney chose not to answer, Tallie finally said that it was not in her husband’s temper either to give or to receive. He responded that he had lately been sick in the chest, but as she had expressed no feeling for him, he had been hardened.

The entire ride home my speculation was hectic with dread. I was finally able to ask if Dyer had felt anything amiss, but he shook his head while keeping his attention on Old Bill. Along the river he pointed out a flooding so extensive it had carried away the long wooden bridge at Washington; fragments of it, with the railing still erect, came floating down past us. Hard on its heels followed a tree of enormous length with uptorn roots and branches lashing the current. Once we reached our property he remarked with disgust on one of our line fences that he said hadn’t been cleared in all the years I’d been here. I said that it looked perfectly serviceable to me and he said that it looked like a hedge.

Sunday 6 May

No word from Tallie. No visit. A mild and lonesome night. My anxieties cause me between tasks to pace the house like a prisoner. The windows open.

My mother told me once in a fury when I was just a girl that my father asked nothing of her except that she work the garden, harvest the vegetables, pick and preserve the fruit, supervise the poultry, milk the cows, do the dairy work, manage the cooking and cleaning and mending and doctoring, and help out in the fields when needed. She said she’d appeared in his ledger only when she’d purchased a dress. And how have things changed? Daughters are married off so young that everywhere you look a slender and unwilling girl is being forced to stem a sea of tribulations before she’s even full grown in height.