A Map of the World
PRAISE FOR JANE HAMILTON’S
A MAP OF THE WORLD
“Like a lot of books singled out for praise,
A Map of the World
can be described as a page-turner. But in this case, the pages are turned with trembling hands.”
—
People
“This beautifully written story follows the form and function of all great literature: it assembles a gripping cast of sinners, sufferers, and opportunists, then gives them the settings and self-perceptions to hang or redeem themselves.”
—
Glamour
“Few writers have the courage to attempt a truly adult novel or the skill to produce one. Thankfully, Jane Hamilton is among them. A daring writer.”
—
New York Daily News
“The book is exquisite in its individual passages, compelling as a whole.”
—
Women’s Review of Books
“Unforgettably, beat by beat, Hamilton maps the best and worst of the human heart and all the mysterious, uncharted country in between.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
“Hamilton’s special genius lies in blending the quotidian and the mythic.”
—
U.S. News & World Report
“A beautifully developed and written story reminiscent of the work of Sue Miller and Jane Smiley … one wants to read this powerful novel at one sitting.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“… engrossing, powerful …”
—
Christian Science Monitor
Also by Jane Hamilton :
THE BOOK OF RUTH
First Anchor Books Edition, June 1995
Copyright © 1994 by Jane Hamilton
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canad Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday in 1994.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events; to real people, living or dead; or to real locales are intended only to give the fiction a setting in historic reality. Other names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
Special thanks to master cartographer Katy Seeley, and to the National Endowment for the Arts, and to the Ragdale Foundation, where much of this book was written.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following:
The Poems of W. B. Yeats:
A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneron. Copyright 1940 by Georgie Yeats, renewed 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats, and Anne Yeats. Used by permission.
Little House in the Big Woods
by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins. Copyright renewed 1960 by Roger MacBride. Little House is a registered trademark of HarperCollins.
Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
. Oxford University Press. Used by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hamilton, Jane, 1957–
A map of the world / by Jane Hamilton. — 1st Anchor Books ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
1. Dairy farms—Middle West—Fiction. 2. Farm life—Middle West—Fiction. 3. Children—Death—Fiction. 4. Middle West—Fiction. 5. Drowning—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.A4427M36 1995b
813’-54—dc20
95-3001
eISBN: 978-0-307-76406-5
v3.1
For STEVEN SHAHAN
with love and thanks.
And for ELIZABETH WEINSTEIN
also with love, and with thanks in each day
all the way back to B-34.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part 1 - Alice
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part 2 - Howard
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Part 3 - Alice
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
About the Author
Alice
——
Chapter One
——
I
USED TO THINK
if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn’t learned that it can happen so gradually you don’t lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don’t necessarily sense the motion. I’ve found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.
I opened my eyes on a Monday morning in June last summer and I heard, somewhere far off, a siren belting out calamity. It was the last time I would listen so simply to a sound that could mean both disaster and pursuit. Emma and Claire were asleep and safe in their beds, and my own heart seemed to be beating regularly. If the barn was out the window, clean, white, the grass cropped as close as a golf course, the large fan whirring in the doorway, then my husband Howard was all right. I raised up to take a look. It was still standing, just as I suspected it would be. I had never said out loud a little joke I used to say to myself now and again: Everywhere that barn goes, Howard, you are sure to be close behind. He was a philosophical and poetical farmer who bought Golden Guernseys
because he both liked their color and the way “Golden Guernsey” floated off his tongue. It was secondary that the breed was famous for their butterfat. I worried about his choice when we bought the farm because I was certain that poetry is almost never rewarded. Now, in my more charitable moods, I wonder if our hardworking, God-fearing community members punished us for something as intangible as whimsy. We would not have felt eccentric in a northern city, but in Prairie Center we were perhaps outside the bounds of the collective imagination.
The ambulances were streaking down the highway while I lay in bed in our farmhouse, in what used to be a very small town called Prairie Junction. Three years before they had built a greyhound racetrack outside of the city limits, a facility which has brought so many business and goods and services to the area the governing body voted to change the name of the new, improved version of our town to Prairie Center. Even people who lived there could never remember where they were.
I wondered if a building was burning down, if there was a car accident at the perilous intersection, or a baby coming early in one of the subdivisions. Our range of disaster in that town was fairly limited, but we were due for something, certainly. The last rain had come at the beginning of April and now, at the first of June, all but the hardiest mosquitoes had left their papery skins in the grass. It was already seven o’clock in the morning, long past time to close the windows and doors, trap what was left of the night air, slightly cooler only by virtue of the dark. The dust on the gravel had just enough energy to drift a short distance and then collapse on the flower beds. The sun had a white cast, as if shade and shadow, any flicker of nuance, had been burned out by its own fierce center. There would be no late afternoon gold, no pale early morning yellow, no flaming orange at sunset. If the plants had vocal cords they would sing their holy dirges like slaves.
I often had the fanciful thought that the pond would save us; it would be the one thing that would postpone our deaths by scorching as the climate of our part of the world changed. We were going to spend the long summer months ahead thinking always of the relief of our own unspoiled waters. Most afternoons our daughters, Emma and Claire, and I, and occasionally Howard, farmer, husband, and father, would walk the thirty yards down the wooded path to the jewel of the property, the clear
water gurgling up from a spring into a seven-acre pond. There were no leeches, no film or scum or snapping turtles, no monstrous vestiges from the Cretaceous Age lurking in the depths. There, under the blazing sun, were cool, clean ripples spreading from their mysterious source and fanning to the shore, while trout circled beneath.
I needed to get out of bed. Howard, in his quiet, sissing voice, soothing as a dove, had told me to sleep in, but I should have been up to help him, should have woken hours earlier. I lay still and took another minute to smell: I smelled the warm, sweet, all-pervasive smell of silage, as well as the sour dirty laundry spilling over the basket in the hall. I could pick out the acrid smell of Claire’s drenched diaper, her sweaty feet, and her hair crusted with sand. The heat compounded the smells, doubled the fragrance. Howard always smelled and through the house his scent seemed always to be warm. His was a musky smell, as if the source of a muddy river, the Nile or the Mississippi, began right in his armpits. I had grown used to thinking of his smell as the fresh man smell of hard work. Too long without washing and I tenderly beat his knotty arms with my fists. That morning there was alfalfa on his pillow and cow manure embedded in his tennis shoes and the cuffs of his coveralls that lay by the bed. Those were sweet reminders of him. He had gone out as one shaft of searing light came through the window. He had put on clean clothes to milk the cows.
I knew just then, in a brief glimmer of truth, that the stink and mess, the frenetic dullness of farming, our marriage, the tedium of work and love—all of it was my savior. Half the world seemed to be scheming to escape husbands or wives, but I was planted firmly enough, striving, always striving, to take root. I was sure that that morning our family was connected by a ribbon of pure, steaming, binding, inviolable stench, going from room to room and out to the barn. I was so far from my mistakes of the school year, never considering in the freedom of summer that my winter’s missteps could strain our vigorous bonds.
At breakfast I was putting out bowls when Claire banged her spoon on the table and announced, “I’m going to die when you do.”
“What?” I said, once in a voice roughly an octave lower than usual, and then again in my normal register. “What?” What had possessed Claire, three years old, to say such a thing, other than the terrible force of
our doomsayer genes? Or was she prescient? Did she see before her our wrecked car, the Jaws of Life working in vain to extract what was left of us? In any case, I wasn’t paying strict attention that morning; I didn’t think about my five-year-old daughter, Emma, requiring milk in her red plastic cup so that she could pour her own milk over her cereal. In all innocence I poured the unpasteurized, completely homogenized milk from our cows straight from the blue pitcher into Emma’s bowl.