by Larry Watson
If Ned hadn’t risen at that moment Harriet would have taken hold of his narrow shoulders and helped him to his feet.
Soon the water stopped. The pipes cooled and clanked, and in the basement the water tank hissed with the effort of heating water for the next bather. That would be her, Harriet thought, and climbing into the bathtub after Sonja House had been there would surely feel strange, but then life with Ned Weaver created many anomalies of ownership and possession. Harriet also planned to make her own the pastels that her husband produced during what she already thought of as the bathroom session. She felt she had earned that work.
Sonja had run the bathwater so hot it divided her body perfectly—red below the waterline and pale pink above. Was that why he had left his post in the hall (she saw his reflection in the mirror)—because by doing nothing more than turning one tap more than another she had altered the look of her body? Perhaps his plan for today did not include drawing or painting a woman striped like a beach ball.
He would no doubt come back soon and request something else of her. He might want her to lie naked on the cold tile floor, or perhaps he had gone to fetch ice cubes and when he returned he would order her to replace the hot water with cold, so he could make her lie in frigid water as he told her another artist had once done because he wanted his model to look as blue as if she had drowned. Ah, well, in the meantime she would enjoy her bath while it was hers alone.
These were rich people, yet their bathtub was not longer or deeper than the one in her home. Was that because Mr. Ned Weaver was a short man? And was Mrs. Weaver too afraid of her husband to say, no, I want a tub I can stretch out in? Or had the Weavers, like Henry and Sonja, simply bought a house already built and then shaped their lives to all its borders?
But the temperature and amount of hot water was certainly superior to the House’s. Sonja reached forward to cool the bath slightly, and as she touched the tap, it happened. What was it—the sight of her body divided by water and, as with any image of above and below, she reflexively thought of above and below the earth? Was it the feel of being confined to a strange container? Or was she wrong to look for cause at all—John could come back to her at any time, and he needed no summons or invitation.
Perhaps it was a good thing that Mr. Weaver had refused to paint a picture of her son. A portrait by a famous artist would probably have to be displayed, and then John would not be her son so much as a Ned Weaver creation. He would remain forever the age he was in the painting, and Sonja had tried all along to imagine her son changing—growing taller, losing his baby fat and baby teeth, keeping his hands still at his sides instead of reaching for something to fondle or stroke. She knew that sometimes she was not fair to June, in the way she watched her daughter for the alterations that age brought and then tried to picture what those changes would have meant for her boy. But thinking of him aging was one of the few methods she had to keep from dwelling on what was never to change. Or to think of what changes could occur only in the grave. Or, worst of all, to cease thinking of him altogether.
Water that ran belowground was cold, cold, cold, and Sonja turned off the tap and pulled the plug. The spiral of draining water reminded her of a rose’s closed petals.
Someone knocked on the door, and before Sonja could answer, Ned Weaver was in the room.
“Put the plug back in,” he said. “We’re not finished here.”
How many times, during their years of marriage, had Henry said to Sonja, when she asked about the spelling or meaning of a word, “Look it up”? He hadn’t meant to be harsh or unhelpful. He was merely repeating the lesson he learned from his sophomore English teacher, Mrs. Stamper, who similarly refused to define or spell words for her students. “If I tell you,” she said, “you’ll forget. But if you look it up for yourself, you’ll remember.”
Yet not until Henry hung up the telephone following his conversation with Harriet Weaver did he realize they did not have a dictionary in the house, or at least none he could find. He went out to his truck and drove to the public library in Sturgeon Bay, thirteen miles away.
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary was a red-bound volume so tattered that lengths of string trailed from its cover, but Henry chose it exactly because of its signs of wear. It must have been pulled from the shelf often because of its reliability. He turned the thin pages carefully until he came to the M’s, and there he found, as the fifth definition for the word mistress, “a woman who habitually fornicates with a man not her husband.”
Henry had been sure this was the sense with which Harriet Weaver used the word, but he thought, with so much at stake, he should seek verification. He was equally certain of the meanings of fornicate and adultery, but he looked up those words as well.
In his mind he drew lines from word to word, and as they connected they combined and together pointed Henry in the direction he had thought all along he would have to go. Now, however, his impulses were validated, corroborated by the words on paper, and not by the Bible or some other manual or guidebook on right behavior but by the impersonal, unbiased, independent authority of the dictionary.
28
Henry could not decide—should he knock on the door or try the knob and hope to walk right in? If he knocked, he would be giving them warning, and they might have time not only to stop what they were doing but to agree not to answer the door at all. Yet if he turned the knob and found it locked—wouldn’t that little rattle raise an even more urgent alarm?
He finally settled on a knock, but with the butt of the gun, a sound to freeze their hearts with fear. They would have to open up.
When he raised the gun to bang on the cabin door, he caught the faint, acrid smell of cordite, though it had been hours since he’d fired the gun.
29
Shortly after they were married, Henry had asked Sonja—dared her, would be more like it—to walk across the county with him. The distance was only ten miles, from the waters of Green Bay in the west to the great blue expanse of Lake Michigan in the east, and Sonja was confident she could walk that far. Three things made the trek much more difficult than she had imagined. The heat—they set out on a mild sunny morning in August, and by the time they finally arrived back home in the afternoon the thermometer on their porch read ninety-five degrees. Sonja did not care for the taste of beer, but she drank a bottle in a tavern in the town of Adamsport on the other side of the peninsula. Second, she hadn’t considered the effect the hills would have. Later in the day it was as hard to walk down as it had been to climb up. She had to shorten her stride when they descended or she would feel the shock all the way up her spine. Finally, when she accepted Henry’s challenge to walk across the county, she hadn’t realized that of course they would have to walk back as well. She couldn’t protest, because he would only tease her—how did she think they would get back home! But that night and every night for the following week Henry massaged her legs with witch hazel, his long powerful fingers working the liniment deep into her muscles.
Now there was no chance that Henry would offer that kind of relief. Sonja could not even allow him to see she was sore, much less to reveal the reason why.
The previous day Weaver had kept her in the same pose for hours. He had her kneel on the bed with her back straight, her head up, and her arms at her sides. Her only relief came when he repositioned her and his easel to accommodate the shifting angle of the light. At the end of the session, she was stiff, but she had no idea that this morning simply descending the stairs would be so difficult. And when June had trouble with her snow boots, and Sonja knelt down to help, the pain in her thighs intensified until it felt as though the muscles had been set on fire.
It was the second time in as many days that she thought of part of her body burning. Yesterday, when she allowed her back to bend and her head to droop for a second, she caught sight of her pubic thatch, blazing in a shaft of light so that individual hairs looked like wires heated to glowing, and today Ned Weaver would want to light that same fire again. Bef
ore their session ended, he had marked her position on that itchy green blanket with chalk. If she did not want to be completely crippled tomorrow, she would have to insist on more frequent breaks.
Just then Henry came out of the kitchen, those strong fingers that moments ago Sonja had been dreaming about wrapped around a coffee cup.
“First snow, huh?” Since his voice was cheerful, Sonja knew he was speaking to June. “I remember when I was a kid how I looked forward to tracking up the first snow of the season.” Perhaps he was not so removed from the pleasures of his childhood. He had left the house before dawn, and returned with the leather of his boots soaked through.
June said, “Huh-uh! It snowed on Halloween!”
“Just a dusting. We can’t count that. Has to be at least an inch, and we got that and then some last night.” He glanced out the window next to the door. “And it looks as though it might not be done yet.”
“Stay out of the snow before you get on the bus,” Sonja cautioned June. “No snow angels until after school.”
Henry held the door open for his daughter while Sonja pulled June’s muffler up to cover her chin. Sonja kissed her and Henry patted her back as she walked out of the house. Together they watched her walk down the driveway, lifting her feet higher than the new snow’s height required.
Once the door was closed, Sonja said, “She needs new boots.”
“Can it wait until Christmas?”
Although the Christmases of her own childhood were austere, Sonja disapproved of using gifts to provide the necessities of life. “We’ll see.” She resolved to use her own money for June’s new boots.
Henry followed Sonja into the kitchen, where she began to clear the breakfast dishes. Finally he cleared his throat and the statement she had been waiting for came forth. “I’m thinking of buying the old Pepperdell orchard.”
“Another orchard.” She did not attach a question mark to these words. “Where is this one?”
“Not far. You maybe didn’t know it was there. It’s up behind your artist’s place.”
“My artist . . .”
“Well? I’m only saying what’s so.”
She knew he would probably like nothing better than to draw her into argument, so she held her tongue. She continued to do her chores, and each time she paused and glanced in Henry’s direction, she caught him watching her, staring so intently he seemed in doubt of her identity.
Finally he asked, “Do you want a ride over there today?”
“Over there?”
“To your artist’s. You’re not going to tell me you aren’t planning to go?”
Sonja unplugged the percolator and disassembled it. She dumped the grounds on an open newspaper and then put the bundle in the garbage. He was right; she was scheduled to be at Weaver’s studio today, and he’d asked her to come as close to nine o’clock as she could.
“Are you wondering how I know you’re going over there?” Henry asked.
She lifted the coffeepot. “There’s a little left. Do you want it or should I pour it out?”
“Your dress,” Henry said. “On the days you go over there you wear a dress.”
Sonja shook her head, but she could say nothing to correct him. The truth was, she wore a dress only on the days when she knew she would disrobe, and only then because either of the two dresses she might wear had buttons up the front and were easy to take off and put on. The blue dress, which she’d worn only once, zipped up the back. But hadn’t he noticed the many times she left the house for a modeling session in different attire?
“So, as long as we’re traveling in the same direction, I could drop you off.” He held out his cup, and she poured the remaining coffee into it.
“The same direction?” Sonja trusted neither his smile nor his offer.
“I told you. The Pepperdell orchard. I’m driving over to give it another look.”
“Thank you. No. I’ll walk.”
“Suit yourself.” He swirled the coffee in his cup, staring at it as though even his morning coffee should be regarded with suspicion.
On the floor under the table lay a scattering of crumbs from June’s breakfast toast. They were lined up like insects following their leader. Sonja was on her way to the closet for the broom and dustpan when Henry grabbed her wrist.
The memory of the night when he dragged her out of their bedroom and into the hall must have leaped into Henry’s mind at the same instant as Sonja’s because he released her immediately.
“Please,” he said. “Not today.”
Now she realized why his expression today looked so strange. Although his face was split by the smile that Sonja always thought he turned on as effortlessly as a light switch, his eyes glistened the way they did in the days following John’s death.
“I must,” she said.
“You must, huh. Like a job, you mean?”
She wished she could say, Very well, today I will not go. Instead I will stay at home, and you will buy another orchard, and every problem of our lives will be solved. On those trees apples as large as pumpkins will grow, and the fruit will be as sweet as candy and one apple will yield a gallon of cider. Oh, why not let the apples from the Pepperdell orchard be all that and more—let them be magic apples and a single bite enough to erase any memory of loss or forethought of grief to come!
“Like a job. Just so.”
Henry nodded as though this was the answer he expected. “Okay, go. But do me this one favor, will you? Tell me you’re not doing it just for the money. Give me that much respect.”
That was odd. She would have thought he’d make the opposite request. “All right. It’s so. I don’t pose for the money only.”
At that, Henry bent low and with one arm made a sweeping motion toward the door as if to say she was free now to leave and with his blessing.
The crumbs under the table would have to wait. Sonja jerked open the closet door. Hanging there was the refutation of her belief that we should not make gifts of necessities. The Christmas after John died Henry gave her this coat, made in Germany of soft red wool, hooded and adorned with buttons of elk horn. Of course, she had needed a coat, but hardly one as expensive as this—she had seen it displayed in the window of the Treasure Shoppe in Fox Harbor. But she had no time now to discuss philosophies of gift giving. She pulled out the coat with such speed the hanger clattered and spun off the rod, and she was out the door before further words of argument or, for that matter, of farewell, could pass between them. All the possibilities of Henry’s anger were not what hurried Sonja on her way. She was afraid that Henry would ask another question, one she feared she could not answer. Why did she do it, if not for the money alone?
Henry led Buck out of the barn and into the icy dark of—what was it, late night or early morning? The horse obviously did not retain a memory of snow from season to season because his first steps in this year’s first snow were, as in all other years, higher and more cautious than usual. Henry would not have been surprised to see Buck lift a hoof and then shake it, just as a cat quivers its paw after stepping in snow. A few fat wet flakes still fell, and when they hit Buck’s back he twitched in defense as though summer insects furnished his only memory of something lighting on him from the sky. Henry wanted Buck to move faster, but that wasn’t about to happen until the horse accustomed himself to the strange substance underfoot and the muscle-stiffening effects of the cold. Finally, by the time they reached the apple trees, Buck settled into a gait that matched his owner’s sense of urgency. Henry’s resolve, meanwhile, flickered like the flashlight beam that lighted their way.
Horse and owner were heading toward the hollow at the northeast end of the orchard, near that large brush pile still waiting to be burned. Henry had dug the hole there not only because he believed the soil was less rocky but also because he figured the frost line was deeper. He was right on both counts, but a hole of those dimensions had still taken two days to dig. As he came closer now he saw that the new snow had turned his mound of fresh dirt w
hite while the hole itself remained dark to its depths.
Henry positioned Buck right at the edge of the grave, though it meant he had to back the horse up and lean hard on his flank, a procedure not unlike parking a car.
Henry’s reasoning, the thoughts that brought horse and owner to this site well before dawn, was both primitive and complicated: First of all, Henry believed that if something were to happen to him, he could not be certain Buck would be cared for. His dog, Sandy, yes. Even June could take responsibility for Sandy, if it came to that. But Buck couldn’t be fed table scraps or sleep under the porch; he needed the kind of attention that required special knowledge of horses. And Buck had reached the age when he needed more attention, not less. No, Buck had been Henry’s charge for over twenty years—the horse was, in fact, the first life other than his own that Henry was responsible for; it wasn’t right that Henry trust now that someone else feed and stall the animal, much less brush and exercise him and throw down his throat those kidney pills he needed daily.
But Henry also believed that if he and Sonja were to survive to see the darkness at the other end of this day, then maybe, maybe what he was about to do would bring her back to his side and keep her there forever. Among the losses of the past couple years, Henry counted the power to distinguish half-crazed notions from sensible ones, desperate strategies from the practical, but with this plan he didn’t care. So many obstacles had come between Sonja and him, perhaps eliminating one might make a difference.
Henry did not shine the flashlight on Buck’s head to pinpoint where the bullet should go. Instead, Henry ran his finger down along the velvet of the horse’s ear until he came to the depression behind which was the horse’s brain, and then Henry quickly substituted the pistol barrel for his index finger. Henry stood at Buck’s side because he was sure once he pulled the trigger he’d have to give the horse a shove to make certain Buck fell sideways into the hole. For that reason, Henry didn’t face Buck and aim the bullet at the tip of his white blaze.
