by Jane Smiley
“I didn’t feel like it.” She laughs again.
“Why are you laughing? You’ve been very serious about this for more than a year.”
“I can’t do it anymore. It’s too strenuous.”
“The walk?”
“It’s more like a trudge upstream.”
“We walk to town all the time.”
“Yes, WE do. It’s not the walk, it’s the departure. The whole trip is one long departure from you and Tom and the place and the routine.”
“I knew you were thinking that. I was trying to make you think that. I wanted it to be hard for you.”
“Well, that part was fun, actually.”
“It was?”
“That you wanted it to be hard? Of course. It gave me just the little push I needed to get going, or to get out of bed in the cold and say my prayers.”
I must look a little shocked, because she regards me for a long minute, without smiling, but with a ready, receptive look on her face, as if she is taking me in anew. She says, “Bobby, you know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.” And then, “You always think too well of me. I love you partly because you never fail to see beauty in what you look at, but that scares me, too.”
“I see beauty in you.”
“Don’t evade me!” Her eyes snap and she is suddenly angry. “There is something about each other that each of us has to see! If you come too close, it will go out of focus, and we won’t see it.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. I’m working that out. I’ve been working that out all day.”
I have to say that I don’t know what she is talking about, or even how to understand what she is getting at. It shouldn’t surprise me that this churchgoing loops into our marriage, but it frightens me a little bit, as if she could now quit anything, having quit that. I close my mouth and go outside to take a leak off the porch. I can tell a lot of snow has melted by how the hole we made has sunk through to brown grassy earth. I cast my eyes around the place, toward the barn. No noises, no disturbances. No reason there should be. When I go inside, the argument has already begun.
“Why do you just walk away?”
“I had to piss.”
“You had to evade this issue.”
“What issue?”
“I can’t believe you. I simply can’t.”
We don’t often argue this way, mired in our different modes of perception, and when we do I think it is because we don’t know what we are arguing about, or, if she does, I don’t. I cling to this one fact, that she didn’t go to her meeting today. I say, “I don’t know why we are angry. I don’t know what we are arguing about.”
“You are simply indifferent to the fact that I’ve been wrestling with one of the central issues of our lives! You walk away from me as soon as I bring it up!”
“Bring what up? You haven’t brought anything up!” I realize that I am entering into the absurdity of all of this, but the thing about absurdity is that it isn’t only funny, it is also disorienting and grating.
“I am trying to bring it up. I am literally trying to bring something up, as if I were choking on it, but I don’t know what it is! Why don’t you help me?” And she bursts into tears.
There must be an appropriate response to this, not an action but a feeling or an understanding that something is at stake, that something is lost or about to be. There must be a sadness here that I could enter into, like a closet, but the quickness of her reactions—we can’t have begun this conversation more than fifteen minutes ago, and she has laughed, smiled, listened, gotten angry, wept—blasts all reaction out of me. I stand carefully, as if the house had settled badly. I begin very slowly. I say, “How is it bad that I see beauty in you?”
“It’s untrue.”
“I truly see beauty in you.”
“It’s just a mistake. I can’t explain it.” She sits on the floor cross-legged, tears finished, exuding an air of devastation that will soon eddy into every corner and wash back through our history together. This is not the first time, but these are rare and delicate moments, moments when the seeking, probing quality of her inner life demands something of me that I don’t understand and can’t give, but also when the life I had thought of as a solid is suddenly lit from within, hollow and fragile, tempting me to break it for revenge. I do understand that; yes I do.
Liz is right that my responses are primitive ones, mostly sensuous. Many days pass in which I simply make my way through the hours, make my way around the place. Much of my mental time is spent registering impressions, and when Liz and I remember things, I always remember that there was a strong odor of snake or that the ground was soft or that the trout had coriander leaves sprinkled over it. It must be that I have a strong esthetic sense, since I recognize right and wrong juxtapositions of shapes, tastes, colors, textures continually, like some kind of clocking mechanism that is never turned off. I recognize them, often rearrange them, but I don’t inquire into them. Mostly I hate this argument because it is esthetically jarring, and because a part of me that is undeveloped is being called upon to respond appropriately. “That’s enough now,” is what my grandfather would have said. The most I dare is a dramatic, annoyed sigh.
Liz looks at me for a long moment, then heaves herself up, wipes the hair out of her face, and goes into the kitchen. I move to the table, and start leafing through one of the library books stacked there, Complete Berries and Tree Fruits. The fact is, I betray her almost at once by sinking into the text, slipping out of the argument as out of a husk.
At bedtime she says, mildly, “You’ve forgotten about everything we said, haven’t you?”
“No.” I step out of my overalls, and decide to come clean. “I have sort of absented myself from it, though.”
“You will never change.”
No answer for that one.
In bed, in the dark, she says, “There wasn’t room in my life for two of you.”
“Two of me?” My tone is light, but I am thinking, suddenly and irrationally, that it is a lover she has been going to see, driving in his car with him, his convertible. I speak bravely. “Two of us?”
“There isn’t any other man.”
I inhale again. I used to smoke in the army, and this would be a good time for a cigarette.
“You and God.” She settles herself for sleep. Her words have a bubblelike quality in the dark, self-contained and enigmatic. I have no sense that I have understood anything since I put away the pruning tools.
I awaken and dress in this state of confusion, very early, before dawn, and it deepens as soon as I step off the porch and catch sight of the barn in the half light. The barn door is ajar, and the mushy snow is muddied with many hoof-prints. I follow two sets, pony and foal, as they meander away from the barn, toward the paddock, then away, toward the pond. I think that I will see them from the top of the rise, but I don’t, and begin to run. The ground is wet and slippery. I fall a couple of times, which disorients me more. Over and over, I wonder what time it is.
The pony mare is hidden in the woods on the far side of the pond. She is simply standing in the uncommunicative way equines have, looking at the pond. I turn and survey the pond once, twice. The foal is nowhere, though I note that the ice by the intake has melted, and water is flowing freely and fast out of the stream that feeds the pond. I check the pony. Her legs are wet and cold. She has been in the pond. I look at the pond again; then I see the strangest thing that I have ever seen—the dark form of the foal, stretched out and shadowy under the ice, unmoving. I step toward it. The ice is thick enough to hold me, but clear enough to make out the foal’s white markings. I stand over it. The mare looks at me steadily, and I see in her gaze not indifference, but animal endurance. I squat down on the ice and lay my hand over the foal, and I cannot help weeping.
Sometime later, when I am leading the mare away from her position in the woods (she is balky and reluctant, and I am trying to be kind to her), Tom appears at the top of the rise. He s
houts, “Hey, Dad—,” but then he stops and stares, taking everything in, asking no questions. The mare slows me down. When he turns and runs away, I can’t follow him.
At the breakfast table, he is eating steadily. He gives me a covert glance when I slam through the door; Liz is on me at once—where’s the foal, has something happened to the foal? Tom watches, his eyes flipping back and forth between us, as we hash it out, the night-time escape, their progress toward the pond, how maybe they were trying to get a drink, or the filly was simply frolicking near the intake, the ice broke, the current was fast and the bottom slippery, an accident, very unusual, even for the ponies to go out on the ice. We talk furiously for a while, then sigh, fall silent. Liz cries. I say, “The mare is fine. We can breed the mare again—” It is late. Tom hears the school bus and jumps from the table. We stuff him into his things, and he runs for the end of the lane. The school bus waits and, after a long while, I hear it gear up as it pulls away. Marlys Tillary knows our clock situation. It occurs to me later that I could have let him stay home.
After the morning chores (the mare is whinnying and kicking in her stall), Liz and I take ropes and an ax down to the pond and chop a hole in the ice. It is immediately apparent that though the ice over the foal is about two inches thick, the whole pond is unstable. We work quickly, splashing, wetting ourselves, soon shaking with cold. The foal comes up headfirst, frozen stiff, and now that we have her, it isn’t clear what we are going to do with her. Normally we would bury her in the woods, but the ground is frozen. Howard, of course, would suggest the dead animal removers—pet food. We leave her in the woods near the pond and go into the house to dry off and warm up.
It is hard for a farmer not to take a practical attitude toward animal death. Cats, for example, roam our place, and do a good job keeping the mice down. We pet the cats, and give them names, and admire the variety of their personalities, but we don’t feed them, and we are used to their hunting techniques as well as their population-management practices. I have seen litters born in the winter disappear within two days—the mother eating her young simply because it is too cold for them to survive. I used to trade for a hog and a beef steer every year, name them, raise them, slaughter them, eat them. I fish for trout all season, and I hunt, too. But the fact is, I’ve let the last few years go by without bothering to get a beef calf or a shoat or a venison. I don’t keep a milk cow anymore, and I haven’t shot a duck or a Canada goose since Tommy was a baby. We don’t often slaughter a chicken. It is not a moral position, but it is a disinclination to undergo too many animal deaths. I have to say that I regret this softness in myself, because the world we have here is less fertile and lively because of it—presents fewer experiences, fewer relationships, fewer moral problems. I think it is good to experience one’s power over the animal, to treat it well, house it properly, give it a good life and a painless death, to feel with one’s own hands the bloody cost of one’s appetites, and to know viscerally what one is like—one is like an animal, one lives in nature, where death is.
Even so, the death of the foal is shocking and important. Liz cries again. Over lunch we can’t help reminiscing about how cute she was, what a pretty pony she was turning into, how good Tom was with her. The overcast day is ugly to us, its slop no longer a harbinger of spring, but a menacing eternity of discomfort. When Tom comes home, he has had a bad day—Miss Bussman got on him twice for not paying attention, and he dropped his math book in a mud puddle as he was getting on the bus, and two children stepped on it before he could get off the bus and pick it up. He doesn’t talk about the foal, but he sniffles at the table while eating his snack and whines that we should have a television, though he knows not only that there is no electricity, but in these mountains there is minimal TV reception.
“Annabel Harris got a satellite dish. They get a hundred and thirty-seven channels.”
“That’s a hundred and thirty-seven chances to get stupid. We’ll go to the library on Saturday.”
The look washes over him like water from a bucket. He stands up suddenly, knocking his chair over, tipping his milk. He shouts, “I hate reading. That’s what’s stupid, those books!”
Liz is soothing, “You’ll get better at it. You get better every day. The teacher says you’re really doing well.”
“I don’t care! I don’t want to!”
I must inhale sharply, because Liz throws me a flattening glance, so I keep my mouth shut. Tommy storms upstairs. That’s the first day.
By noon of day two, ours is a universe of snow. Low-hanging clouds seal in our valley, and the blizzard floats in the quiet air, accumulating on tree limbs and roofs inch by inch, but offering no threat. My grandfather would have called this a “corn snow,” and told me that in a few days all of this would sink right into the soil, good moisture for this summer’s crops to draw upon, a gift of practical benefit as well as of beauty. A gift, too, for Liz and me, of suspended time, a universe of silent white noise, lulling us into a nap sometime after lunch. The house is warm, though the windows are uncovered, and it is exhilarating, like skinny-dipping, to strip in the living room, to be free of overalls and long underwear and modesty, to feel the touch of my own hands on my skin, as well as to anticipate hers.
The snow seems to give the minutes a marvelous, languid lag. We are taking our clothes off at a quarter to one, and I notice that it is almost one-thirty as I am dozing off. The nap is one of those snoozy, hypnotic ones, half awake but entirely relaxed, with no dreams, only the contented awareness of cottony white light, minute after easy minute. At two-fifteen I turn over, and think that we have more than an hour to ourselves before the bus comes. Liz, her hip pressed into my thighs, her braid unraveled across the pillow, curls her toes in her sleep and hooks a foot around my ankle. When I awaken again, it is, miraculously, still two-fifteen. I stretch. The room is beginning to cool, which means that the fire needs wood. It is only when I get up to feed it that I realize that the wonderful luxury of time has only been a function of my sleepy state of mind. In fact, the gloom of late afternoon is beginning to take hold, though admittedly earlier than usual because of the overcast. The clock has stopped.
I am slow. It is hard to tell what time it is with this weather, and the utter relaxation of my nap still grips me. I throw some wood on the fire, pausing to stare thoughtlessly at the glowing coals. Liz groans and sighs, throws out an arm. Her eyes still closed, she says, “What time is it? Was that the bus? God, I feel lazy.”
The snow has slacked off. When I step to the window, I see that the cloud cover has lifted off the valley. My guess is it will be clear tomorrow.
“Where’s Tommy?” She is sitting up straight. “It’s going to be dark soon.”
The sudden wedge of panic leaves me breathless. All at once we are groping for socks and overalls and boots, but I have no thoughts, unlike Liz, who realizes that he must have come in, seen us asleep, and headed for the woods behind the pond, intending to investigate the pony foal. She runs there while I check his room, the barn, and the workshop. We call, but it is frustrating in the muffling snow. Truly it is late. The goats are bleating in the barn to be milked and fed. By the time I join her at the pond, it is real twilight. The snow around the mound of the foal is undisturbed, as is the surface of the pond. He is nowhere near here. And now our faculties click in. The page of snow is revealing. It reveals that no child’s boots have made a path of any sort from the head of the lane, that Tom is nowhere on the place.
More faculties click in. We make a plan—I will ski to town and make some calls, after checking at the school. She will wait here and do the milking. If he can’t be found, I’ll get Martin Summerbee to drive me around, and I will also call the police. The plan forestalls panic. I stand on the porch tying my tassels and then locking on my skis. I shake the right ski. It holds. I shake the left. The door slams as Liz goes inside for the milking basin. As I stand up from readjusting my gaiter over my boot, I see the sinuous, living yellow light of a huge fire down the valley, and
I know at once that it is Lydia Harris’s house, and that this is the last time I will ever look outward and see it beckon.
I ski directly for it. The snow is fluffy and light on top, damp and slushy underneath, not the best skiing snow. Rabbits, deer, and pheasant flee my approach. More than once, I have to stop and wipe the ice off my eyelids and mustache. At the bottom of my land, it takes me a while to get through the barbed wire in the dark, then to make my way over the running creek at the bottom of my neighbor’s land. Moreton isn’t far, and it is a big blaze. I do not lose sight of it. It shifts its shape—boxy first, tall and wide as the house, then low, then suddenly tall and narrow. When I stop shushing my skis, I can hear windows pop. There is no yelling or screaming. I would have expected yelling and screaming. The Moreton Volunteer Fire Department plays lights upon it as well as hoses. Even after the hoses are quiet, the lights continue to scan the blackened framework. Then I come to the bottom of the wooded hill below the house, and the whole scene is hidden from view. I take off my skis and clamber across that brook, then push through the new snow, up the steep hill. It is tiring work, this cross-country trek from my place to Lydia’s, harder than I had thought it would be. What is my state of mind? Suspended. Expectant. Annoyed at the effort. I haven’t as yet considered Lydia or Annabel. When I crest the hill, the first thing I see in the scanning light is the arch of the satellite dish beside the garage. The second thing I see is Paul Tillary, the chief of the volunteer fire department. His hands are gripping the shoulders of Tom Miller, my son, and he is speaking to him in deadly earnest.
6. November
The fact is, though there have been police and welfare investigators and lawyers and fire investigators and tax assessors and real-estate and insurance people and perhaps other nameless officials as well, the first time I see Lydia Harris after the fire isn’t until a few days past Halloween. I am on a bus in State College, heading for work. It stops for a light as the door to a pleasant brick house opens. It is a long light, so I can watch Lydia check that the door is locked, secure the strap of her bag over her shoulder, and descend the front steps. She is wearing a red coat, long and generously cut, with blue high heels. At the curb, she crosses with the light that is against us; then the light changes and I lose sight of her.
