“Do you know the father?”
She kicks her horse, holds back and releases; it canters away from him, flinging up mud. Ian holds his own horse to a walk. Something startles in the brush; it beats off, heavily. At the hill’s crest Maggie halts. “No.”
“Well, what do you want of me?”
“Nothing.”
“Permission?”
“Not really.”
“Some sort of green light?” He is angry now; his voice goes high. “Some kind of cheery approval? Yes, Ma, go right ahead, go have a bastard and let me call it brother, sister, Seth. You must have been busy these months, not even to know which . . .” He stops, spits, wipes his face. There is a sudden flurry up above them, in the trees. “What did you expect—that I’d be jumping up and down, saying surely, by all means, get off that horse, let me carry you home, let me put you to bed and bring you breakfast till the baby’s term time comes? Just exactly what’s the point of this, that’s all I’m asking; do you want me to get you a doctor?”
“I’ve done that,” Maggie says.
“Then tell me,” he insists, “just what the hell you require.”
“Help. Someone to say I’m not crazy.”
“You’re crazy,” Ian says.
Now they ride in silence. They skirt a hay barn she has nearly forgotten—half collapsed and empty, its slate roof cracked into seams where the building has buckled beneath it, its foundation bellied out so that the whole east wall bows. Next they pass (this is the homeward turning, she tells him, the outer extent of the farm) the shell of a house she has truly forgotten—white clapboard, slate-roofed also, its windows target practice for the neighborhood children. The brick chimney teeters. There is a front porch with four support columns, vine-choked. Maggie jumps down lightly and tethers Maybe to a column of the porch. He follows her, stiff.
“Who lived here?” Ian asks.
“No one I ever knew. Your grandfather bought it empty, I believe.”
“I don’t remember. When?”
“Way back. When this was a separate farm.”
They sit on the porch steps. He puts his hand out gingerly; she takes and squeezes it, says: “Do you forgive me?”
“For what?” Ian asks her. “For nothing.”
“Not nothing.”
“I like this place,” he says. “Greek Revival?”
“That woman, Anne-Maria. The one whose letters you were reading in my room . . .”
“Yes.”
“This was her dower house, I think. It was built for her and Willard Sheldon. But they never lived in it.”
“Why not?”
“They stayed in Guatemala. They lived in Salt Lake City. She was never welcome back, or maybe they kept on drifting. The family sold it to spite her—then Judah’s father bought it back. Who knows . . .”
“I’d like to look inside.”
She thinks she hears a flute, a far-off intimation. She distinguishes scales, then practice runs, then only the pigeons Ian startles as he swings the entrance door open; the house is wet.
“If it’s all the same to you,” she says, “I’ll wait. It’s warm here on the stoop.”
“Okay. I won’t be long.”
The floorboards creak, complaining. She watches as he enters, letting whatever nests there scuttle off for cover. Then she too steps inside. There is a fireplace to the left, a warren of rooms to the right, and a central hall with only the studs remaining, a freestanding stairwell, no plumbing or electric lights. The banister is intricately carved. Ian paces the length of the house, his footsteps echoing. She asks herself what memory he hunts in this abandoned place, beneath the roof (she can see up to it, through it, where the lath has given way and there are only crossties and a few cracked slates) that seems never to have offered shelter to the intended occupants. Perhaps some tenant farmer or those who came to help with haying had been billeted in the small upstairs rooms; perhaps some family idiot or mistress had been consigned to this space.
Ian makes his way back down the stairwell and, three rungs from the landing, puts his foot right through the wood. She watches him draw back, then jump. He picks a long pine splinter from his leg. “Does it hurt?” she asks; he tells her, “No.” Upstairs the rooms are ten by eight, six of them—he’s counted—each giving on the hall. This is not the time to make a full inspection, they agree; the horses whinny and nicker. But the abandoned house compels him; he will make it, he tells her, his own.
Her father, too, has died. In the last year, Maggie thinks, and with the exception of Ian, the men in her life were outlasted. His death had not been peaceful; he had had a tumor of the brain. She found him raving, in the hospital at Hyannis, sure he was the captain of a whaling ship, and with a mutinous crew.
Maggie had been notified by the hospital staff that her father’s health was critical and she should come if possible. She drove to the Cape on a clear August morning and did not stop for gas until the Sagamore Bridge. Then, more slowly, reined in by traffic, she made her way to his side. When he did not greet or recognize her, she felt as if there’s no escape, there’s nothing that you ever get for free. Your husband who had shammed disease to bring you home lives on with dignity; your father finishes that. He had been a cheerful man, full of mariner’s stories; as a widower he’d moved to Wellfleet and grown a full gray beard. They put him in a single room because he shouted so.
Maggie blamed herself. She thought, maybe what she’d taken as his harmless eccentricity had been the death-dealing tumor. Had she tried to question him (not listening nodding, subservient, unable to say Dad, you’ve never been to Hatteras, you never did use flensing tools), had she taken his headaches as actual, perhaps they might have caught the swelling in his brain. He howled “Avast, me hearties” and knotted the bedsheets like rope. He called his pillowcase a gag and swore he’d make his way by compass and main force through the Barrier Reef.
She shared his last three days. It was more time than she’d spent with him for years. But he had been unreachable—a shrunken, dapper person with water in his eyes. When he died she half believed that he was only resting, and she told the nurse who came to check just not to bother or wake him, please. When the doctor certified his death and signed for it, Maggie thought she saw a stormy petrel fly past the hospital window. She scattered his ashes secretively, later, behind the Harbormaster’s Office of the Wellfleet Dock.
There were Pekin ducks on the back pond behind the garden wall. She’d left them out that winter, not bothering to coop them, but only setting up a windbreak and leaving them cracked corn or crumbs. They could fly, she’d said to Hattie; they could deal with the foxes this winter by themselves. “Sleep, shit, and screw, that’s all they ever do,” was Judah’s barnyard rhyme. So she helped them with cracked corn, but not protection; they could keep the pond from icing over and deploy to the safety of water if there were a fox.
Therefore she’d made her way, every second morning, to the pond. It is behind what used to be the icehouse, maybe forty feet across. The house had been built out of brick, with a slate roof. There is a small stream feeding the pond, granite ledging on three sides, and a mud patch where the pond had silted in. She’d feed the ducks. They yawped and scurried from her and swam to the water’s far edge. She’d check for fox tracks every morning and find none.
Then there was a cold snap, and the pond iced over. Maggie took a walking stick—Judah’s heavy locust cane—and went and found, as she rounded the icehouse, fox tracks. Six duck carcasses lay by the windbreak. There was webbing left, and everything above the neck, and feathers and feet. The frozen blood looked brown.
She could not help admiring the precision of such slaughter—how the one night when the ducks could find no refuge was the night the fox had struck. She supposed the animal had reconnoitered while the ducks eluded it in the center of the pond. They’d huddle fifteen feet away, in water, and wait out his visit. On ice, however, there’d be no escape, and the fox prepared for that.
Ther
e was a riddle about pilgrims with a fox, a rooster, and grain. There was one small conveyance only, and the pilgrim had to cross a river with only one of the three as his cargo; otherwise he’d sink. The problem was to choose his route and companions—since if he left the rooster with the grain, the rooster would consume the grain, and if he left the fox and rooster, the rooster would be eaten in its turn. This was true on either side, though salvation waited on the farther bank.
There was a solution, she knew. She tried to remember the riddle. You take the rooster first, leaving behind the fox and the grain. Then you come back and bring the fox with you, but take the rooster back. Then you ferry the grain across and come back empty-handed and return with the rooster and take up the journey again.
Just so, and just as carefully, she has tried to organize cargo. She has done double journeys and kept things separate and attempted to keep slaughter down. But the solution argued wakefulness; it meant she had to stay with one while loading up the other, meant the rooster would not dare to eat in the pilgrim’s supervisory presence. And Maggie feels herself, these days, unable to furnish protection. Let them eat each other or die of starvation, she thinks; what happens happens anyhow; it’s only a question of time.
Judah’s death, for instance, had come in the fullness of time. This was Hattie’s phrase, and then the minister’s, though Maggie knows that Hattie thinks his death was premature. The doctors talked of surgery; they had talked of implanting a pacemaker; they warned him off too much to eat, and exertion and smoking, but he said a shot of whiskey drove the angina away. They said, “With luck, you’ll live a good long time, and with any luck at all at least a dozen years.”
But then he had his heart attack and everything was blockage, stoppage, old age fisting fingers through his arteries like ice. Then he was on borrowed time, with credit running out. Then he was at every instant’s mercy, and his sister doled out blood-thinning pills. Maggie watched. He winked at her. He gave Hattie maraschino cherries in exchange, and she said the Lord’s mercy abounded, and he himself had no real fear of credit running out. He said the Lord was not an accountant with favored clientele; you don’t tally debits and credits for angina pectoris if you’ve reached the ripe old age of seventy-six.
“You take that pill now,” Hattie urged. “It’s just one extra swallow in the day.”
Judah choked the white pills back. He gagged on them, Maggie knew; though they were smaller than anything else he ate, they would enlarge in his mouth. They filled the space behind his tongue and thickened as his throat thinned down, and he tried to feel his thick red blood go watery because of the helpful effect of the pills. In their shared room, at night, he spoke to Maggie about it. He wondered should he go on living if living were a hardship, and wondered when he’d know it had become a hardship that wasn’t worth enduring, or was too hard to bear. “You’ll know,” she told him, and he puckered the skin of his cheeks and furrowed the skin of his forehead, concentrating, attempting to know.
They trot the first mile back. Then, at the trail’s highest point, she halts, and her son draws up beside her while they survey what they own. “I like things best in spring,” she says. “You see the contours of the land, the edges—that river there, those foothills. It’s such a green profusion in the summertime; everything crowds together. In a month.”
“I sneeze,” Ian says.
“What?”
“In a month I start to sneeze,” he reminds her. “For all of June.”
“Still? I thought you’d outgrown it.”
“In cities it isn’t so bad. There ain’t no pollination in cement.”
Maggie smiles—her overgrown infant, faking bumpkin chatter in the breeze. “You could have shots.”
“No.”
She looks at Ian sidelong, studying. He wears a red shirt, has gray-blue eyes; his horse is brown. The fields are umber and ocher and a translucent green. “I lied to you,” Maggie says.
He rolls his sleeve down, carefully, then buttons it. He shifts the reins, then does the same, less carefully, to his left sleeve.
“About what?”
“My pregnancy.”
“I thought maybe,” he says. “Menopause. You’re not pregnant, are you?”
There is relief in his voice, and she hears this with regret. “I am.”
“Then how did you lie?”
“It isn’t maybe,” she says. “It’s definite. And I do know the father.”
“Who . . .”
“I got the tests back yesterday. The rabbit says ‘yes.’ Yes.”
“Well.” Ian masters himself. “Just you and me and baby makes three.”
She takes his tone. “That’s what I’d hoped you’d say,” she says.
(Maggie had called the doctor. She introduced herself, and they discussed the weather—the astonishing quantity of rain, okay; and how are you feeling this morning, is it still like this next month in your country, this part of the country, okay, it’s devastation elsewhere, Walter Cronkite says, because of the drought; his wife had never seen such activity, moreover, as with the cows at auction, they went Wednesday night, where we come from such animals are sacred—while she waited for her breathing to quiet, for the hint of yes or no or maybe that would organize his prattle into prophecy, her fate. He told her in his singsong fashion that they hoped to have some cousins come, their relatives would visit just as quickly as the passage could be arranged, okay, and has she been to Albany to see the mall like Delhi’s, and would she recommend Las Vegas as a vacation destination since his wife had a passion for gambling, okay, unfortunate, but true. Finally she asked him outright, and he said, “Congratulations, Mrs. Sherbrooke, you’re a very lucky woman, you must give your husband my compliments. Yes.”)
“This is the last ride,” Ian says, “the three of us will take.”
“Yes, sir,” she says.
“Hang on.”
There is a passage in the letters that she knows by heart. It gives life to that archaic language, those beliefs she does not share, and to her present hopes. Anne-Maria wrote:
“Guatemala is a Pleasant Land, with what I venture to approve will be a Healthfull Climate and a people anxious to receive the Call. One tale I wish to tell you, brother, in the Belief it signifies; down here there is a Native Child who has had his tongue spliced from some Harsh Foreman’s cruelty. Who knows the cause? I could not ascertain it, nor do the parents willingly speak of the case (if indeed they be his Parents under whose thatched roof he lies and whose fire he tends, whose food shares). Perhaps it was the common treatment for some childish Deviltry; perhaps indeed he was born thus, as some in the Village make claim. He is a silent boy—ten years old or thereabouts, lissome in contour and gait. We could not make him Speak to us, though Willard is adept at speech, the dialect no obstacle, and I have always had—as I trust you will grant is plain Truth and not Boastful—a way of talking with the Young.
“Still, Jo resisted. I call him Jo because his actuall name is far far longer, a disharmonious series of x’s it is difficult to write. I would bring him little gifts and sit by the Fire he stirred (Evil comes to these huts if the hearth-flame Expire) and Eat of his corn-cakes and drink the milky water here from the one tin cup. I will not bother you with details of my talk. I spoke of the Green Mountains where in America we live, and how someday I hoped to show him railroad trains such as our Father possessed. I spoke of the tablets of Mormon, and how it is our fast Belief that revelation persists—that even in these latter ages God may speak to man. He listened, his lips closed. I must confess that, as the weeks continued with no utterance from Jo, my resolution failed. I thought perhaps the forked tongue was the Sign of some Satanic presence, not an attentive Child. Imagine if you will how when he wiped his lips, having shared our frugal repast or proffered me his own, a segment of his tongue caressed the upper lip whilst simultaneous with that a segment licked the nether. Yet in the third week he said, ‘Hold’—in the fourth ‘Urim and Thummin’—in the fifth said, ‘Mrs.
Sheldon, you are a good woman to me.’
“I wept; I weep to write it; there is grace abounding in the farthest reaches of our Earth.”
IX
She keeps it a secret as long as she can, and for many reasons. First, she’s superstitious. Keep your head in the sand, she tells herself; don’t count a chicken till hatched. If she does not identify the future’s danger or delight, it might not come to pass. She dismisses Mrs. Russell so the cleaning woman cannot see her; if she is not seen, she tells herself, her stomach is not visible. Because of Ian’s presence and the mess that a third person makes, Mrs. Russell is willing to go.
There might be complications. Maggie does not know this pregnancy will come to term; the odds seem strongly against it. But in the fifth month of gestation she takes the test for Down’s Syndrome; whatever is in her is whole. She passes; they pass; she feels as if the doctor is a hard taskmaster, testing her. He slaps the needle on her stomach like a ruler, and she waits for his verdict like grades. Then he becomes a guru and benign; she feels herself falling in love. He and Ian are the two men in her life, the only two who know. Ian keeps her secret, she is sure. And in the fifth month she requests Dr. Rahsawala not to tell; she tells him how she hopes to give her husband a gift. For the same reason, Maggie says, she does not want to know the baby’s sex. He offers her the option, but she says she’s superstitious and would rather be surprised.
The road to his office is magic. It takes forever to arrive and no time at all to return. Then, when she falls in love with him, she drives there in an instant and takes forever to crawl home. In July he says, “Mrs. Sherbrooke, I know you’re a widow, okay, I do not mind.” He sits behind the desk, his brown face smooth, his hair slicked back, drinking Coca-Cola from a coffee mug. She bleeds a little the next day, and calls him, and he tells her not to leave her bed. She does remain there, attempting to read until the spotting stops. For the time it lasts, however, she contemplates miscarriage, and learns past contradiction—from the heart-stopping sorrow that wells up in her, and the tears she cannot stop—how much she wants this child. She is afraid of bearing it but terrified of losing it; the tea Ian brings her is too strong to drink. She studies herself in the bedside mirror—a wild, aging woman who’s come to this pass, who’ll stay in bed if necessary till her baby’s born.
Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) Page 31
