Housekeeping: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson

  The boat was already in the water, bobbing about at the end of a short rope that Sylvie had weighted down with a stone. She pulled it in and turned it so that I could step over the gunwale without getting my feet wet.

  It was evening. The sky glowed like a candled egg. The water was a translucent gray, and the waves were as high as they could be without breaking. I lay down on my side in the bottom of the boat, and rested my arms and my head on the splintery plank seat. Sylvie climbed in and settled herself with a foot on either side of me. She twisted around and pushed us off with an oar, and then she began to reach and pull, reach and pull, with a strength that seemed to have no effort in it. I lay like a seed in a husk. The immense water thunked and thudded beneath my head, and I felt that our survival was owed to our slightness, that we danced through ruinous currents as dry leaves do, and were not capsized because the ruin we rode upon was meant for greater things.

  I toyed with the thought that we might capsize. It was the order of the world, after all, that water should pry through the seams of husks, which, pursed and tight as they might be, are only made for breaching. It was the order of the world that the shell should fall away and that I, the nub, the sleeping germ, should swell and expand. Say that water lapped over the gunwales, and I swelled and swelled until I burst Sylvie’s coat. Say that the water and I bore the rowboat down to the bottom, and I, miraculously, monstrously, drank water into all my pores until the last black cranny of my brain was a trickle, a spillet. And given that it is in the nature of water to fill and force to repletion and bursting, my skull would bulge preposterously and my back would hunch against the sky and my vastness would press my cheek hard and immovably against my knee. Then, presumably, would come parturition in some form, though my first birth had hardly deserved that name, and why should I hope for more from the second? The only true birth would be a final one, which would free us from watery darkness and the thought of watery darkness, but could such a birth be imagined? What is thought, after all, what is dreaming, but swim and flow, and the images they seem to animate? The images are the worst of it. It would be terrible to stand outside in the dark and watch a woman in a lighted room studying her face in a window, and to throw a stone at her, shattering the glass, and then to watch the window knit itself up again and the bright bits of lip and throat and hair piece themselves seamlessly again into that unknown, indifferent woman. It would be terrible to see a shattered mirror heal to show a dreaming woman tucking up her hair. And here we find our great affinity with water, for like reflections on water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement. They mock us with their seeming slightness. If they were more substantial—if they had weight and took up space—they would sink or be carried away in the general flux. But they persist, outside the brisk and ruinous energies of the world. I think it must have been my mother’s plan to rupture this bright surface, to sail beneath it into very blackness, but here she was, wherever my eyes fell, and behind my eyes, whole and in fragments, a thousand images of one gesture, never dispelled but rising always, inevitably, like a drowned woman.

  I slept between Sylvie’s feet, and under the reach of her arms, and sometimes one of us spoke, and sometimes one of us answered. There was a pool of water under the hollow of my side, and it was almost warm. “Fingerbone,” Sylvie said. I sat up on my heels. My neck was stiff and my arm and hand were asleep. There was a small, sparse scattering of lights on the shore, which was still at a considerable distance. Sylvie had brought us up to the side of the bridge and was working the oars to keep the current from carrying us under it.

  I knew the bridge well. It began above the shore, some thirty feet from the edge of the water. I knew the look of its rusted bolts and tarred pilings. The structure was crude, seen from close up, though from any distance its length and the vastness of the lake made it seem fragile and attenuated. Now, in the moonlight, it loomed above us and was very black, as black as charred wood. Of course, among all these pilings and girders the waves slipped and slapped and trickled, insistent, intimate, insinuating, proprietary as rodents in a dark house. Sylvie pulled us a few feet out from the bridge and then we rode in again. “Why are we staying here, Sylvie?” I asked. “Waiting for the train,” she said. If I had asked why we were waiting for the train she would have said, To see it, or she would have said, Why not, or, Since we are here anyway, we might as well watch it go by. Our little boat bobbed and wobbled, and I was appalled by the sheer liquidity of the water beneath us. If I stepped over the side, where would my foot rest? Water is almost nothing, after all. It is conspicuously different from air only in its tendency to flood and founder and drown, and even that difference may be relative rather than absolute.

  The morning that my grandmother did not awaken, Lucille and I had found her crouched on her side with her feet braced against a rumple of bedclothes, her arms flung up, her head flung back, her pigtail trailing across the pillows. It was as if, drowning in air, she had leaped toward ether. What glee there must have been among the few officials who lingered, what a tossing of crepe-banded hats, what a hearty clapping of gloved hands, when my grandmother burst through the spume, so very long after the clouds had closed over the disaster, so long after all hope of rescue had been forgotten. And how they must have rushed to wrap their coats around her, and perhaps embrace her, all of them no doubt flushed with a sense of the considerable significance of the occasion. And my grandmother would scan the shores to see how nearly the state of grace resembled the state of Idaho, and to search the growing crowds for familiar faces.

  Sylvie pulled the boat some distance from the bridge. “It shouldn’t be long now,” she said. The moon was bright, but it was behind her, so I could not see her face. There was so much moonlight that it dulled the stars, and there was a slick of light over the whole lake, as far as I could see. In the moonlight the boat was the color of driftwood, just as it was by day. The tarred bridge was blacker than it was by daylight, but only a little. The light made a sort of nimbus around Sylvie. I could see her hair, though not the color of her hair, and her shoulders, and the outline of her arms, and the oars, which continually troubled fragments of achromatic and imageless light. The lights of Fingerbone had begun to go out, but they had added nothing to the sum of light and could subtract nothing from it.

  “How much longer?” I asked.

  Sylvie said, “Hmmmm?”

  “How much longer?”

  Sylvie did not reply. So I sat very quietly, drawing her coat around myself. She began to hum “Irene,” so I began to hum it, too. Finally she said, “We’ll hear it before we see it. The bridge will tremble.” We both sat very quietly. Then we began to sing “Irene.” Between darkness and water the wind was as sour as a coin, and I wished utterly to be elsewhere, and that and the moonlight made the world seem very broad. Sylvie had no awareness of time. For her, hours and minutes were the names of trains—we were waiting for the 9:52. Sylvie seemed neither patient nor impatient, just as she seemed neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. She was merely quiet, unless she sang, and still, unless she pulled us outward from the bridge. I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected—an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.

  “Sylvie,” I said.

  She did not answer.

  And any present moment was only thinking, and thoughts bear the same relation, in mass and weight, to the darkness they rise from, as reflections do to the water they ride upon, and in the same way they are arbitrary, or merely given. Anyone that leans to look i
nto a pool is the woman in the pool, anyone who looks into our eyes is the image in our eyes, and these things are true without argument, and so our thoughts reflect what passes before them. But there are difficulties. For one, the wreck of my grandfather’s train is more vivid in my mind than it would have been if I had seen it (for the mind’s eye is not utterly baffled by darkness), and for another, the faceless shape in front of me could as well be Helen herself as Sylvie. I spoke to her by the name Sylvie, and she did not answer. Then how was one to know? And if she were Helen in my sight, how could she not be Helen in fact?

  “Sylvie!” I said.

  She did not reply.

  We had ridden in against the bridge again, and were almost under it when the girders began to hum. She rested the flat of her hand against a piling. The sound grew louder and louder, and there was a trembling through the whole frame. The whole long bridge was as quick and tense as vertebrae, singing with one alarm, and I could not have known by the sound which direction the train would be coming from. She had rested the oars, and we bobbed farther and farther under the bridge. She folded her arms on her knees and buried her face, and she swayed and swayed and swayed, so that the boat tipped a little.

  “Helen,” I whispered, but she did not reply.

  Then the bridge began to rumble and shake as if it would fall. Shock banged and pounded in every joint. I saw a light pass over my head like a meteor, and then I smelled hot, foul, black oil and heard the gnash of wheels along the rails. It was a very long train.

  She stood up. The boat wallowed and water spilled in over our feet. She turned to look behind her. I threw my arms around a piling to steady us. The last of the train passed over our heads and sped away. She combed her fingers through her hair and said something inaudible.

  “What did you say?” I shouted.

  “Nothing.” She gestured at the bridge and the water with upturned hands. She stared out at the moonlit lake, smoothing back her hair, and nothing in her posture suggested that she remembered she was in a boat. If she had stepped over the side, and the skirt of her dress had billowed up around her, and she had lifted her arms and slid through the rifts of moonlight into the wintering lake, I would not have been surprised.

  “Sylvie,” I said.

  And she said, “I probably wouldn’t have seen much anyway. They put the lights out so that people can sleep. I was just woolgathering, and all of a sudden it was right there on top of us. And wasn’t it loud, though.”

  “I wish you’d sit down.”

  Sylvie sat down and took the oars and pulled us away from the bridge again. “The train must be just about under us here,” she said. She leaned over and peered into the water. “Lots of people came in from the hills. It was like the Fourth of July, except that the bunting was black.” Sylvie laughed. She shifted around and peered over the other side.

  The wind was rising, and the boat sat rather heavily in the water, because we were over our shoes in water. I scooped some of it up in my hands and spilled it over the side. Sylvie shook her head. “There is nothing to be afraid of,” she said. “Nothing to be worried about. Nothing at all.” She dipped her hand into the lake and let the water fall from her fingers. “The lake must be full of people,” she said. “I’ve heard stories all my life.” After a minute she laughed. “You can bet there were a lot of people on the train nobody knew about.” Her hand trifled with the water as if it were not cold. “I never thought of that as stealing,” she said thoughtfully. “You just find yourself an empty place, out of everyone’s way—no harm done. No one even knows you’re there.” She was quiet for a long time. “Everyone rode that train. It was almost new, you know. De luxe. There were chandeliers in the club car. Everyone said they had ridden on it—all my old friends. Or their mothers had, or their uncles had. It was famous.” She combed and sifted the water with her fingers. “So there must have been a lot of people in the freight cars. Who knows how many. All of them sleeping.”

  She said, “You never know.”

  I noticed that my feet disappeared from the ankles into a sheet of moonlight. When Sylvie moved or gestured, the light was rumpled and shadows fell over it, but just then she was lying back against the prow, trailing her hand in the water. It occurred to me to wonder whether all this moonlight together, if it could be seen from the necessary altitude, would make an image of the moon, with shadows for the sockets and the mouth.

  “Aren’t you cold, Sylvie?” I asked.

  “Do you want to go home?”

  “All right.”

  Sylvie took the oars and began to pull us toward Fingerbone. “I can’t sleep on a train,” she said. “That’s something I can’t do.” The wind was blowing out from the shore, and the current carried us always toward the bridge. She pulled and pulled but, for all I could see, we hardly moved. Fingerbone was extinguished and the bridge pilings were one like another, so I could not be sure. But watching Sylvie seemed very much like dreaming, because the motion was always the same, and was necessary, and arduous, and without issue, and repeated, not as one motion in a series, but as the same motion repeated because here was the mystery, if one could find it. We only seemed to be tethered to the old wreck on the lake floor. It was the wind that made us hover there. It was possible to pass out of the sight of my grandfather’s empty eye, though the effort was dreadful. Sylvie rested the oars and folded her arms, and we bobbed away from the shore again.

  “Let me try rowing,” I said. Sylvie stood up and the boat wallowed. I crawled between her legs.

  My left arm has always been stronger than my right. For every two strokes with the oars together I had to take a third with the right oar alone, until I abandoned the idea of staying beside the bridge. To follow the bridge was the quickest way home, or it would have been if any progress had been possible, but as it was I let the current carry us under the bridge and toward the south. The wind was steady and the shore was inaccessible. I rested the oars. Sylvie had folded her arms and laid her head on them. I could hear her humming. She said, “I wish I had some pancakes.”

  I said, “I wish I had a hamburger.”

  “I wish I had some beef stew.”

  “I wish I had a piece of pie.”

  “I wish I had a mink coat.”

  “I wish I had an electric blanket.”

  “Don’t sleep, Ruthie. I don’t want to sleep.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “We’ll sing.”

  “All right.”

  “Let’s think of a song.”

  “All right.”

  We were quiet, listening to the wind. “What a day,” Sylvie said. She laughed. “I used to know a woman who said that all the time. What a day, what a day. She made it sound so sad.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Who knows?” Sylvie laughed. The moon was going into eclipse behind a mountain, and the night was turning black. Sylvie had begun to hum to herself a song I did not know, and every moment was like every other, except that sometimes we turned, and sometimes a wave slapped our side.

  “We could have tied the boat to the bridge,” Sylvie said. “Then we’d have stayed close to town, and we wouldn’t have gotten lost.”

  “Why didn’t you do that?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Do you know ‘Sparrow in the Treetop’?”

  “I don’t feel like singing.”

  Sylvie patted my knee. “You go to sleep if you want to,” she said. “It won’t make any difference.”

  As it happened, as the sun rose we were near the west shore of the lake, and still within sight of the bridge. Sylvie rowed us in, and we beached the boat and climbed up to the highway and walked to the railroad. I dozed on the rocks while Sylvie watched for an eastbound train. A freight came after a long time, and it slowed so cautiously for the bridge that we clambered into a boxcar without much difficulty. It was half full of wooden crates and smelled of oil and straw. There was an old Indian woman sitting in the corner with her knees drawn up and her arms between her knees. Her
skin was very dark except for an albino patch on her forehead that gave her a tuft of colorless hair and one white brow. She was wrapped in a dusty purple shawl that was fringed like a piano scarf. She sucked on the fringe and watched us.

  Sylvie stood in the door, looking out over the lake. “It’s pretty today,” she said. Portly white clouds, bellied like cherubs, sailed across the sky, and the sky and the lake were an elegant azure. One can imagine that, at the apex of the Flood, when the globe was a ball of water, came the day of divine relenting, when Noah’s wife must have opened the shutters upon a morning designed to reflect an enormous good nature. We can imagine that the Deluge rippled and glistened, and that the clouds, under an altered dispensation, were purely ornamental. True, the waters were full of people—we knew the story from our childhood. The lady at her window might have wished to be with the mothers and uncles, among the dance of bones, since this is hardly a human world, here in the fatuous light, admiring the plump clouds. Looking out at the lake one could believe that the Flood had never ended. If one is lost on the water, any hill is Ararat. And below is always the accumulated past, which vanishes but does not vanish, which perishes and remains. If we imagine that Noah’s wife, when she was old, found somewhere a remnant of the Deluge, she might have walked into it till her widow’s dress floated above her head and the water loosened her plaited hair. And she would have left it to her sons to tell the tedious tale of generations. She was a nameless woman, and so at home among all those who were never found and never missed, who were uncommemorated, whose deaths were not remarked, nor their begettings.