Housekeeping: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson

  Edith found her boxcar and composed herself in it, while the trainmen went about the jamming and conjoining of cold metal parts. In such weather one steps on fossils. The snow is too slight to conceal the ribs and welts, the hollows and sockets of the earth, fixed in its last extreme. But in the mountains the earth is most ceremoniously buried, with all its relics, against its next rising, in hillock and tumulus. In Butte the old woman had lain on her back and laced her fingers, and her breath had stood above her. When she arrived in Wenatchee, the ghost was gone, the exorcism accomplished. Sylvie said that she and Edith had picked berries together, and that once they had both worked in a canning factory. That winter a mutual friend had had the use of a cousin’s house in Butte. The old woman had sat by the stove and sucked her fingers (in summertime there would have been unexpungeable sweet stains), and talked at trying length of other days. “You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time,” Sylvie said. When she remembered that we were there and that we were children she sometimes tried to make her stories useful.

  It was with a certain Alma that Sylvie had sat one Sunday on a stack of pine boards in a lumberyard outside Orofino, waiting for the sun to rise, waiting through all the alarms, the birds’ sudden risings from their woods, and the dogs’ barking. It was the wind, Alma said. The wind was as rank as a hunter and never the same twice. At night it retreated into the mountains where the creatures prowl and whelp, and before day it came down again, smelling of blood. “That’s what frightens the birds,” Sylvie assured us, because she had never seen the sun come up but the birds first rose and cried what warning they could.

  A hundred yards from the railroad track was a truck stop. Its windows lit up, and they could just hear “Irene.” And farther down the road was the state institution among its fallow, isolating fields, where Sylvia and Alma had a mutual friend whom they both at that moment would have wished to see, except that too often she pulled her long hair down so that it hid her face, and wept with anger.

  But when the sunlight came, after the woods were no longer black or the sky cold and high and pink, then it was excellent to drowse there while the boards breathed incense. A cat found them and lay in Sylvie’s lap for a while. Alma brought back hot dogs from the café. They sang “Irene” over and over, as if to themselves. “When you’re traveling,” Sylvie always said, “Sundays are the best days.”

  Sylvie had moved downstairs, into my grandmother’s room. This room was off the kitchen, three steps below the level of the rest of the ground floor on that side of the house. It had glass double doors opening into the grape arbor, which was built against the house like a lean-to, and into the orchard. It was not a bright room, but in summer it was full of the smell of grass and earth and blossoms or fruit, and the sound of bees.

  The room was plainly furnished. There was a wardrobe by the double doors and a chest under the window, both built by my grandfather, as could be seen from the fact that the front legs of the wardrobe and the legs on the left side of the chest were somewhat longer than the back or right legs, to compensate for the slope of the floor. Two of the bed’s legs stood on wedge-shaped blocks. All three pieces were painted creamy white, and would have been completely unremarkable, except that my grandfather had once ornamented them. On the doors of the wardrobe there appeared to have been a hunting scene, turbaned horsemen on a mountainside. On the head of the bed he had painted a peacock, hennish body, emerald tail. On the dresser he had put a wreath or garland, held in the hands of two cherubs who swam in ether, garments trailing. Each of these designs had been thought better of and painted out, but over years the white paint had absorbed them, floated them up just beneath the surface. I was always reminded of pictures, images, in places where images never were, in marble, in the blue net of veins at my wrists, in the pearled walls of seashells.

  My grandmother had kept, in the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers, a collection of things, memorabilia, balls of twine, Christmas candles, and odd socks. Lucille and I used to delve in this drawer. Its contents were so randomly assorted, yet so neatly arranged, that we felt some large significance might be behind the collection as a whole. We noted that the socks, for example, all appeared unworn. There was a shot glass with two brass buttons in it, and that seemed proper. There was a faded wax angel that smelled of bayberry, and a black velvet pincushion in the shape of a heart, in a box with a San Francisco jeweler’s name on it. There was a shoebox full of old photos, each with four patches of black, felty paper on the back. These had clearly been taken from a photograph album, because they were especially significant or because they were not especially significant. None of them was of a person or a place we knew. Many were of formally dressed gentlemen posing in front of a rose arbor.

  In this box I found page 2 of a brochure of, it seemed, great and obvious significance. It was slick and heavy, like a page from National Geographic, and it was folded in thirds like a letter. At the top of the page was printed, Tens of millions in Honan Province alone. Then there was a series of photographs. One showed a barefoot boy standing in stark sunlight, squinting at the camera. Another showed a barefoot man squatting against a wall, his face hidden in the shadow of a large hat. Another showed a young woman feeding a baby from a cup. The fourth was of three old women standing in a row, shading their eyes with their hands. The fifth was of a squinting girl and a thin pig. The pig was not facing the camera. At the foot of the page was printed, in italics, I will make you fishers of men. This document explained my aunt Molly’s departure to my whole satisfaction. Even now I always imagine her leaning from the low side of some small boat, dropping her net through the spumy billows of the upper air. Her net would sweep the turning world unremarked as a wind in the grass, and when she began to pull it in, perhaps in a pell-mell ascension of formal gentlemen and thin pigs and old women and odd socks that would astonish this lower world, she would gather the net, so easily, until the very burden itself lay all in a heap just under the surface. One last pull of measureless power and ease would spill her catch into the boat, gasping and amazed, gleaming rainbows in the rarer light.

  Such a net, such a harvesting, would put an end to all anomaly. If it swept the whole floor of heaven, it must, finally, sweep the black floor of Fingerbone, too. From there, we must imagine, would arise a great army of paleolithic and neolithic frequenters of the lake—berry gatherers and hunters and strayed children from those and all subsequent eons, down to the earliest present, to the faith-healing lady in the long, white robe who rowed a quarter of a mile out and tried to walk back in again just at sunrise, to the farmer who bet five dollars one spring that the ice was still strong enough for him to gallop his horse across. Add to them the swimmers, the boaters and canoers, and in such a crowd my mother would hardly seem remarkable. There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole. Sylvie said that in fact Molly had gone to work as a bookkeeper in a missionary hospital. It was perhaps only from watching gulls fly like sparks up the face of clouds that dragged rain the length of the lake that I imagined such an enterprise might succeed. Or it was from watching gnats sail out of the grass, or from watching some discarded leaf gleaming at the top of the wind. Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion—that everything must finally be made comprehensible—then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

  I was content with Sylvie, so it was a surprise to me when I realized that Lucille had begun to regard other people with the calm, horizontal look of settled purpose with which, from a slowly sinking boat, she might have regarded a
not-too-distant shore. She pulled all the sequins off the toes of the blue velveteen ballet slippers Sylvie bought us for school shoes the second spring after her arrival. Though the mud in the road still stood inches high and gleamed like aspic on either side where tires passed through the ruts, I had liked the slippers well enough. The tingling seep of water through the seams was pleasant on a spring day, when even in broad sun the slightest breeze raised the hairs on our arms.

  If one pried up earth with a stick on those days, one found massed shafts of ice, slender as needles and pure as spring water. This delicate infrastructure bore us up so long as we avoided roads and puddles, until the decay of winter became general. Such delicate improvisations fail. Soon enough we foundered as often as we stepped. By that time the soles of the shoes were substantially gone. Sylvie never bought things of the best quality, not because she was close with money (although, since the money was ours, she spent it timidly, even stealthily), but because only the five-and-dime catered to her taste for the fanciful. Lucille ground her teeth when Sylvie set out shopping.

  So did I, because I found, as Lucille changed, advantage in conforming my attitudes to hers. She was of the common persuasion. Time that had not come yet—an anomaly in itself—had the fiercest reality for her. It was a hard wind in her face; if she had made the world, every tree would be bent, every stone weathered, every bough stripped by that steady and contrary wind. Lucille saw in everything its potential for invidious change. She wanted worsted mittens, brown oxfords, red rubber boots. Ruffles wilted, sequins fell, satin was impossible to clean. None of the little elegances that Sylvie brought home for us was to be allowed its season. Sylvie, on her side, inhabited a millennial present. To her the deteriorations of things were always a fresh surprise, a disappointment not to be dwelt on. However a day’s or a week’s use might have maimed the velvet bows and plastic belts, the atomizers and gilt dresser sets, the scalloped nylon gloves and angora-trimmed anklets, Sylvie always brought us treasures.

  6

  The summer that followed was summer indeed. In spring I had begun to sense that Lucille’s loyalties were with the other world. With fall began her tense and passionate campaign to naturalize herself to it. The months that intervened were certainly the last and perhaps the first true summer of my life.

  It was very long. Lucille and I stopped going to school at the end of March, as soon as the weather relented enough to make truancy possible. As a courtesy to Sylvie we put on our school clothes every morning and walked a block in the direction of school. Where the train tracks intersected the road we followed the tracks, which led to the lake and the railroad bridge. The hoboes built on the shore in the bridge’s very shadows. Our grandmother, to instill caution in us, had told us that a child who came too near a train was liable to be scalded to death where she stood by a sudden blast of steam, and that hoboes made a practice of whisking children under their coats and carrying them off. So we simply looked at the hoboes, who rarely looked at us.

  We in our plaid dresses and orlon sweaters and velveteen shoes and they in their suit coats with the vestigial collars turned up and the lapels closed might have been marooned survivors of some lost pleasure craft. We and they alone might have escaped the destruction of some sleek train, some flying shuttle of business or commerce. Lucille and I might have been two of a numerous family, off to visit a grandmother in Lapwai. And they might have been touring legislators or members of a dance band. Then our being there on a bitter morning in ruined and unsuitable clothes, wordlessly looking at the water, would be entirely understandable. As it was, I thought of telling them that our grandfather still lay in a train that had slid to the lake floor long before we were born. Perhaps we all awaited a resurrection. Perhaps we expected a train to leap out of the water, caboose foremost, as if in a movie run backward, and then to continue across the bridge. The passengers would arrive, sounder than they departed, accustomed to the depths, serene about their restoration to the light, disembarking at the station in Fingerbone with a calm that quieted the astonishment of friends. Say that this resurrection was general enough to include my grandmother, and Helen, my mother. Say that Helen lifted our hair from our napes with her cold hands and gave us strawberries from her purse. Say that my grandmother pecked our brows with her whiskery lips, and then all of them went down the road to our house, my grandfather youngish and high-pocketed, just outside their conversation, like a difficult memory, or a ghost. Then Lucille and I could run off to the woods, leaving them to talk of old times, and make sandwiches for lunch and show each other snapshots.

  When letters were sent to Sylvie about our days and weeks out of school, Sylvie would compose little notes to the effect that the trouble lay with the discomforts of female adolescence. Some of these notes she mailed and some she did not. At the time I thought she lied very blandly about this, considering that she was, much of the time, wholly without guile. But perhaps what she told them was only what she forgot to tell us. Lucille was, often enough, a touchy, achy, tearful creature. Her clothes began to bind and pull, to irk and exasperate her. Her tiny, child-nippled breasts filled her with shame and me with alarm. Sylvie did tell me once that Lucille would mature before I did because she had red hair, and so it transpired. While she became a small woman, I became a towering child. What twinges, what aches I felt, what gathering toward fecundity, what novel and inevitable rhythms, were the work of my strenuous imagining.

  We went up into the woods. Deep between two hills was an old quarry, which we were fond of pretending we had discovered. In places the stone stood in vertical shafts, six-sided or eight-sided, the height of stools or pillars. At the center of each of them was a sunburst, a few concentric circles, faint lines the color of rust. These we took to be the ruins of an ancient civilization. If we went up to the top of the quarry, we could ease ourselves a quarter of the way down its face on our toes along a diagonal cranny, till we came to a shallow cave, just deep enough for the two of us to sit in. There was a thick tuft of grass between us, always weathered, always coarse, that we stroked and plucked as if it were the pelt of an old dog. If we fell down here, who would find us? The hoboes would find us. The bears would find us. No one would find us. The robin so red brought strawberry leaves, Lucille would sing. There was an old mine at the foot of the quarry, where someone had looked for gold or silver. It was just a round black hole, an opening no bigger than a small well, so overgrown and rounded by grass that we could not tell just where the verge was. The mine (which we only looked at and threw things into) and the cave were a great and attractive terror.

  The woods themselves disturbed us. We liked the little clearings, the burned-off places where wild strawberries grew. Buttercups are the materialization of the humid yellow light one finds in such places. (Buttercups in those mountains are rare and delicate, bright, lacquered, and big on short stems. People delve them up, earth and all, and bring them home like trophies. Newspapers give prizes for the earliest ones. In gardens they perish.) But the deep woods are as dark and stiff and as full of their own odors as the parlor of an old house. We would walk among those great legs, hearing the enthralled and incessant murmurings far above our heads, like children at a funeral.

  We—in recollection I feel no reluctance to speak of Lucille and myself almost as a single consciousness even through the course of that summer, though often enough she was restless and morose—we always stayed in the woods until it was evening, and when it was not bitterly cold we stayed on the shore throwing rocks into the water until it was dark. Sometimes we left when we smelled the hoboes’ supper—a little like fish, a little like rubber, a little like rust—but it was not the pleasures of home at suppertime that lured us back to Sylvie’s house. Say rather that the cold forced me home, and that the dark allowed Lucille to pass through the tattered peripheries of Fingerbone unobserved. It is accurate to say that Lucille went to the woods with me to escape observation. I myself felt the gaze of the world as a distorting mirror that squashed her plump and stretched
me narrow. I, too, thought it was just as well to walk away from a joke so rudely persisted in. But I went to the woods for the woods’ own sake, while, increasingly, Lucille seemed to be enduring a banishment there.

  When we did come home Sylvie would certainly be home, too, enjoying the evening, for so she described her habit of sitting in the dark. Evening was her special time of day. She gave the word three syllables, and indeed I think she liked it so well for its tendency to smooth, to soften. She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising a roomful of light against a worldful of darkness. Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship’s cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude. We had crickets in the pantry, squirrels in the eaves, sparrows in the attic. Lucille and I stepped through the door from sheer night to sheer night.

  If the weather was cold Sylvie always had a fire in the kitchen stove when we came home. She would switch on the radio and hum domestically while she heated our soup and toasted our sandwiches. It was pleasant when she scolded us for coming in late, for playing in our school clothes, for staying out in the cold without our coats on.

  One evening that summer we came into the kitchen and Sylvie was sitting in the moonlight, waiting for us. The table was already set, and we could smell that bacon had already been fried. Sylvie went to the stove and began cracking eggs on the edge of the frying pan and dropping them shoosh into the fat. I knew what the silence meant, and so did Lucille. It meant that on an evening so calm, so iridescently blue, so full of the chink and chafe of insects and fat old dogs dragging their chains and belling in the neighbors’ dooryards—in such a boundless and luminous evening, we would feel our proximity with our finer senses. As, for example, one of two, lying still in a dark room, knows when the other is awake.