by Jenna Blum
The regular counting of the knitted stitches kept her from thinking of any boy's foot inside the sock she was making, any foot that had flesh and nails, calluses, blisters, a real foot that might be torn away by a bomb blast or a falling fuse. She didn't think about Tom either, or not directly, nothing beyond the wordless relief of escaping from their little bedroom and his restless movements in the bed. The light in the front room was poor but she didn't think about the oil lamp on the table beside her, how the wick needed trimming; she didn't think about the mud Fred had tracked in on the floors earlier in the day or the dust on all the tables deep enough to sweep a finger through—how she never could stay ahead of her housework now, not any of it, not even the dusting. The entirety of her tired mind was bent on pulling the stitches over and then under the needle, one by one.
She hadn't been knitting more than ten minutes when she heard Tom stirring around in the bedroom, and her stomach tightened as it used to when Fred was a colicky baby and his first faint whimpering at night was almost always a signal of hours of inconsolable wailing. She let down her knitting into her lap but didn't immediately go into the other room to start the wearying work of persuading her husband back to bed; she first had to gather up her will. Her tiredness, now that Tom was so sick, was an inexpressible heaviness in all her limbs, a tiredness not only of the body. She often prayed not for Tom but for relief from what was happening—just a few hours without the strain of caring for him.
The springs creaked and he suddenly appeared in the front room, though she hadn't heard his feet shuffling over the floorboards. He stood in the dim light, his fleshless bones loose in the union suit, and blinked at her with a curiously puzzled expression.
"Ruth, what are you doing out here in the middle of the night?" he said. This was so much like Tom, her Tom, that her eyes burned suddenly with tears.
"I couldn't sleep," she said, "so I've been knitting."
"You're crying. Why are you crying?" He continued to look at her in frowning bewilderment. "Something's wrong, I feel it. What's happening? Tell me what's wrong."
There was such vehemence in his voice, intensity in his face, that it frightened her. What he was asking was ambiguous, undefined, but she thought she knew what it was. "I couldn't sleep," she said with a kind of desperation, and then, "You're dying. Do you remember?"
He looked at her in stunned silence. "I'm dying?" His eyes welled with tears. "Why am I dying?"
"Oh Tom, you have a cancer." She began to cry in earnest, and his face twisted into grief. He came blindly across the room to her and knelt at her chair, took her into his arms in a fierce grasp, and they clung together crying. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he said, with his mouth in his wife's tangled hair.
Fred by then had come staggering out of his little bedroom, his face flushed with sleep and terror. He cried out, "What! What's happening?" and they tried to stop their sobbing for his sake but could not. Tom put out his hand wordlessly to the boy and Fred fell onto them both, twining his arms around them, his thin body racked by coughs of grief.
It was a gift of grace, this last lucid evening of Tom Kandel's life. In the morning he was dim and silent and vacant again, and before he died—a week, less than a week—he would worsen, become bedridden, agitated night and day with terrible pain or an unknowable anxiety. But that night after they had cried themselves out Tom sat on the floor, his bony spine resting against his wife's knees, one hand cupping his son's head to his shoulder and the other gripping his wife's hand as she leaned over him and rested her cheek against the top of his hair, and he said every important thing that had gone unsaid. He told them how much he loved them both, and how much he loved their life together, and how proud he was of Fred. He told them he would miss seeing his son a man and married, would miss meeting and holding his grandchildren, but—a dim smile—"if your mother is right in her beliefs of a life beyond the grave, then when you hear the floor creak at night it will be me looking in on you." He talked to them about the farm: if they had to sell the place after he was gone they should remember that it was possible to make a good life anywhere. He asked both of them, but especially Fred, to read Montaigne and Walt Whitman and to pay attention to what those men had to say about dying and about death and about happiness. He told Ruth that he would miss seeing her grow to be an old woman, which surprised her—such an odd and deeply loving thing to say—and which made her cry again. He asked her to put their wedding photograph and a Kodak picture of Fred in the pocket of the suit he would be buried in, "just in case you've been right in your church-belief all these years, and when I'm in heaven I'm able to take the pictures out and look at them." And he said to Ruth that she was a strong-minded woman, as strong as any woman he had ever known, and he expected her to get back on her feet in no time.
There were long silences between the things he said to them. Neither Ruth nor Fred spoke very much. Ruth would remember afterward that she had meant to say certain things herself and that she had not said them. She and Fred murmured "yes" over and over, and breathed in the warm scent of Tom, the realness, the aliveness of him, while they waited for what he would say next. Afterward their memories differed in small ways. Fred thought he heard his father say that happiness was not a state of mind, that it was moments here and there in a life, and the important thing was just to try to be well content. Ruth remembered Tom telling them they'd eventually become happy again after he was gone, that happiness was the natural and desirable state and they shouldn't feel guilty or selfish about that, but look for and relish the coming moments of joy.
When Tom died a few days later Ruth was out of the room, had gone into the kitchen to reheat the pot of black coffee for the third time, and when she came in again and found he was gone she sat down at the edge of the bed. She felt a choking in her throat, a need to gasp, to catch her breath again and again as if his death had been unexpected. She picked up his hand and held it, stroked his forearm over and over, smoothing the fine hair flat with her palm. It was only just those few minutes I was gone! Couldn't you have waited? She was so very tired, it was hard to sort out what she felt; it was hard afterward to remember if she had even cried, and if she had, what the tears were about. Later she would realize that these were the first minutes of his unending absence and of her beginning to experience a kind of meaninglessness in the world, a nullity that she would be years overcoming, but she didn't realize that just yet.
Before she went to wake up Fred, before she told him his father had died, she bathed Tom's body right there in their bed. She sluiced the washcloth, the warm soapy water, very gently over his bony ribs and shoulders, over his skin grown so thin and tender. She laved the water in slow strokes over his long, pale limbs, lifting one after the other his flaccid arms, his legs. He had lost so much weight she thought he would be easy to move, but his body was leaden, unwieldy. She turned him partway onto his side, propped against the pillows, in order to wash his back and his nether parts. Afterward she swabbed out his mouth, his ears, soaped and rinsed his lank and greasy hair and gave him a haircut with scissors; she cleaned and trimmed his fingernails, scraped the whiskers from his slack cheeks with a razor and soap. His eyes behind the half-closed lids did not watch her. He was still warm under her hands, his body as familiar to her, as intimately known, as her own.
26
MOST OF THE MEN in those days belonged to fraternal clubs. Every up-and-coming town had a Sons of the Pioneers, an Odd Fellows Lodge, a Knights of Pythias, or Woodmen of the World—two or three brotherhoods whose purpose was to give men a reason to get together. Women had their own secret societies and organized sisterhoods but in general didn't need to look for excuses to gather. In Elwha County groups of women were always coming together to finish a quilt for a family that had been burned out or to embroider a burial dress and coverlet for a poor dead baby whose mother was still sick in bed with eclampsia. And when the war came on, women found plenty of purpose and reason to congregate, knitting socks for soldiers and sailors or preparing comfo
rt kits for the Red Cross to ship overseas.
Before the war and during it, Louise Bliss was a member of several needlework circles, none of which was formal enough to require a name or a fixed meeting date. She wasn't the sort to belong to Eastern Star or that kind of sorority but she was a founding member of a study club of women who called themselves the Elwha Valley Literary Society, which met in the Shelby Grange Hall every first Thursday of the month with the stated purpose of keeping up with current events and the issues of the day and discussing the great works of literature. Louise had been a young woman with young children when the club first began to meet, and in those early years of the new century when almost everything seemed to be going well and people still had faith in themselves and in this country's right conduct, debate and discussion in the Literary Society had often given way to the staging of scenes from classic paintings or novels. Keeping up with current affairs had meant, at least for some women, having an opinion about the craze for a certain kind of hat or one of the new dances, and literary discussion more often than not involved the recitation and praise of various members' overwrought nature poetry.
It was after the war broke out in Europe that the Literary Society became, for a few years, a serious discussion group. Members were reading daily about the starving children in Flanders, and some had sons or brothers who had gone to Canada to enlist in the Royal Navy; they argued and discussed whether newspaper reports of atrocities—INFANTS SPITTED ON GERMAN SWORDS!—ought to be taken at face value or whether, as some people said, this sort of thing was warmongering propaganda. Before long the society began mounting formal debates on the question of whether Americans ought to get involved in Europe's war; this led to formal and informal argument over other matters, for instance whether Margaret Sanger in Brooklyn ought to have been arrested for handing out birth control information and whether Jeannette Rankin over in Montana would cause a riot when she arrived in Washington D.C. as the first woman elected to Congress. In a women's club devoted to the topics of the day, there was no shortage of matters for discussion.
That was all in the three years while war raged in Europe but before the United States of America joined the fighting. After that most people seemed to feel there was less reason or room for engaging in debate. If their government declared war, people felt their one duty was to help the country win it; to act otherwise would be treasonable. Women in the Elwha Valley Literary Society sat together knitting sweaters and socks while visiting speechmakers urged the virtues of wartime sacrifice. There weren't any debates about whether the Committee of Public Information was censoring the news and issuing propaganda; it was generally believed, if these things were happening, they were in the best interests of the war effort and "for the sake of the boys." In January, after the defeat of the national women's suffrage bill, it was not suffragism that came up for discussion but questions about the responsibilities of patriotism. Angry suffragists had marched in numbers on the Capitol and the White House, and some angry women in the Literary Society made it clear they thought protest marches at this particular time, with American boys beginning to die overseas, was out-and-out insurrection. When Bruno Walter was suspended as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra it was a widely held opinion in the study club that the symphony had done the right thing—Walter was German, after all, and hadn't bothered to apply for American citizenship.
Louise Bliss, who had always disliked argument and discord, had kept out of the early debates about war and sedition, and after the start of the U.S. war her patriotism took the form of steadfast knitting and a Liberty Garden. While George pored over the war news out of a terrible compulsion, Louise avoided the newspapers: their son Jack was over there and she couldn't bear to read the details of battles or the names of the dead soldiers, who by January were dying at the rate of five or six every day, and by February sometimes as many as a dozen. Of course by June it would be twenty-five or thirty and, by October, two hundred a day, but all of that was still waiting offshore, like lightning over the water, and in February Louise was still of the opinion that ten or twelve was a great many.
She was deeply distressed by the unpleasantness that the war had brought to the Elwha Valley Literary Society, rifts that had left some of the women not speaking to others. Sometime in the winter months Mary Remlinger and Jessie Klages, whose children were American-born but who were themselves Rhine-landers, had dropped out of the society, and Irene Thiede began staying away from any meetings billed as patriotic in subject matter. Louise had never warmed to Mary Remlinger but she liked Jessie Klages and was particularly fond of Irene Thiede and wished they hadn't been made to feel unwelcome.
That was the winter Louise took it into her head that Shelby ought to have a library. After quizzing Martha about the lending library in Pendleton, she brought the idea to her study club. It was a difficult time for fundraising, what with everybody putting their savings into Liberty Bonds, but Louise argued that creating a library was more a matter of raising books than raising money and she swung the vote in favor of the project. She hadn't said so, but her unspoken hope was that this undertaking might distract the members from matters and arguments related to war.
A Shelby Reading Room Committee was formed and promptly named Louise Bliss chairwoman; members of the committee began petitioning the owners of buildings in Shelby to donate space for the new library. In the meantime, books collected from members' own shelves and the closets and shelves of their importuned neighbors went to the Bliss ranch. Louise or George, or occasionally whichever hired hand happened to be there, carried the books upstairs to Miriam Bliss's old bedroom, where they stood in loose piles and stacks against the walls or in boxes set down on the bare mattress.
"I don't know whether you know it," George said to Louise one day early in March after he had carried up three or four armloads of books, "but I'm getting too old to make that trip up the stairs more than forty or fifty times a day."
He was standing on the back porch with his hands tucked into the bib of his overalls, and Louise was on her knees in the garden pulling up weeds around her rhubarb plants. She hadn't gone out there intending to start weeding but while she'd been standing in the yard chatting with Pauline Ashe—it was Pauline's books George was teasing her about—her eye had gone to a particularly flagrant burdock that had raised its coarse head above the rhubarb patch, and one thing had led to another. "George, I'm too tired to find that amusing," she said, and was more than half-serious about it. It had been a clear mild day, so springlike that she had dragged the carpets outside one by one and beaten them clean of their winter dirt. Her arms and her back ached; she didn't know why she was now out in the garden pulling up weeds.
George watched her silently for a while and then took out his pouch of Bull Durham and made a cigarette and smoked it, leaning against one of the porch uprights. It had been an unusually open winter, and from that porch on a clear day you could see all the way across the valley to the Whitehorns, their jagged peaks rising dramatically from the valley floor without much in the way of preliminary foothills. This was late in the day and the sky didn't have a cloud in it, and a reddish light, streaked and veined, had climbed up the mountains so they seemed garishly painted against the blue. George was used to the sight and hardly took notice of it. "What did your library ladies decide to do about those German books?" he said.
The library project, as it turned out, had brought on new problems without easing any of the old ones. A box of German-language books, left anonymously on the porch of the Grange Hall, had raised a terrible furor, as quite a few women thought the books had been left there by a Bohemian or Rhine-lander as a deliberate insult to the society. Anyone would know, went the argument, that such books were absolutely unwanted by this or any library in the nation. And there had been bitter disagreement over what to do with English translations of books by famous German writers—Goethe, for instance. Four or five women of a literary bent had been firm in their opinion that the books were innocent and ou
ght to be accepted, but more than a few others wanted them carried straight out to the town dump; this arguing had caused two more women to stop coming to the meetings.
"They're not my ladies," Louise said crossly, "and I'm just about at the point of quitting the whole thing." She had been suffering from a sour stomach for days, which she blamed on this business of the German books.
George didn't know if she meant quitting the Elwha Valley Literary Society or quitting the Library Committee and he didn't think her tone allowed him to ask. He said cheerfully, "Well I'm just about at the point of buying myself an automobile plow." He hadn't planned to say this to Louise yet, but the tractor was what popped out of his mouth when he opened it. He'd been thinking about buying a Fordson for a while now and lining up arguments in favor of the idea, the boiled-down version being that the world needed more wheat, and banks had become generous about loaning money to the farmers growing it, and the new Ford tractors were small and surefooted. Up until three or four years before, the only plowing George ever did was turning over Louise's garden, but with a lot of his pasture grass now given over to growing wheat, plowing was a hateful chore that took up more and more of his time right when he ought to be getting ready to brand the calf crop. If he still had three or four men working for him he wouldn't worry so much about getting it all done, but Will Wright had gone off with the last batch of enlistees and now it was down to just himself and El Bayard. He didn't know how the two of them would ever get the wheat fields plowed and planted before it came roundup time.
