“That’s all?” he asked, opening his eyes wider. Alice said once that she always worried about making astonishing remarks in front of Rafferty because she feared his eyes might pop out.
It occurred to me that what little I had said made her sound like a psychopath, like a woman who couldn’t confide in her own husband. I think he sensed my discomfort. He began asking logical questions about the farming operation. I found myself explaining in great detail about how to get a good seed bed for alfalfa. I told him my calf losses were about three percent, a statistic I was proud of. I’d made plywood four-by-four hutches for the newborns and then I’d feed them whole milk diluted with hot water, from nipple pails. Pretty early on they’d get a mix of corn, brewers’ pellets, oats, and minerals. I didn’t tell Rafferty that Alice would go on binges, talking about the problem of chin hairs for a full hour, chronicling the different electrolysists she’d been to in her life. I used to laugh until my side hurt at her impersonations of the hairless ladies rooting out her follicles. There were times though, when I could hardly get her to notice I was standing in her way. She imagined that Claire had lived before, that she’d been a princess in ancient Egypt, that she had previously learned how to charm animals and men.
When Rafferty asked me about Lizzy’s death I told him, as best I could, the sequence of events. There were several things I omitted, however. When Alice shouted, “Don’t force me,” in the church vestibule at the funeral, everyone froze. Lizzy’s relations, all in a line, pulled away from their embraces, their handshakes, their words of comfort. They looked at my wife tramping out the door. I stood still and stared at the floor, trusting that time would pass. It did. Finally the woman behind me huffed, “Well.” That served as a signal for noise and motion to resume. Theresa was the only one in line who was kind enough to ask after Alice.
I don’t remember exactly what I said to explain or excuse her before I went into the sanctuary. I put my head down for the opening prayer. Right away I realized I was cursing Alice instead of turning my thoughts to Lizzy.
Even as I was telling Rafferty about the percentage of butterfat in my Guernseys’ milk, I had the feeling that I’d lost part of my memory, or experience. Something was happening to my brain. I used to be certain about plenty of things. That certainty was slipping away as I rested between my sentences. I didn’t tell him that my wife had been sleeping twenty hours a day. I didn’t say that she hadn’t been able to speak or dress herself. I told myself afterward that omission isn’t much of a sin. It’s a safety valve, nothing more or less, for those of us who have been brought up to be honest at all costs. I didn’t mention the night before her arrest, when I’d come into our room and seen her on the bed. She used to do that, go to bed while it was still light, because she was waiting. It used to be a sign. I had come in that night and found her lying on the bed with her clothes on. She was shivering, in the heat. All that was in keeping with our common language. I knew that she had finally come back into herself because she raised her head and turned toward me. I was sure then that she’d been waiting.
I couldn’t have explained what had taken place that night, to Rafferty, or to anyone else. I hadn’t given it much consideration myself. She had knocked me over. She had kneed me in the jaw as she flew up. Rafferty was saying he didn’t know how people got over the death of a child. He stared at me from across the table. I felt my jaw with both hands, like the hurt was fresh. I said they’d probably never recover. He asked me if there was anything else I should tell him. That night before they came to get Alice I had misunderstood the signs, the private language, the rituals—things I had taken for granted for years. Rafferty kept his eyes on me, as if I was the culprit. I said again that I didn’t know how you’d continue after a loss like that. I wondered if I had ever understood Alice. I wondered, how, after years of our life together, there was only a handful of sentences that I would admit to a stranger about my wife.
Chapter Twelve
——
T
HERESA APPEARED AT OUR
door the night after the preliminary hearing. I wasn’t expecting to see her. It was mid-July and they’d been gone almost a month. I had been trying to clean a cherry stain off the new white T-shirt my mother had given Emma earlier in the summer. Emma had realized, too late, that wiping her dirty hands on the shirt would spoil it. She was trying to be calm and hold steady while I scrubbed hard against her ribs. Claire was in the living room, glassy-eyed, watching a musical-variety show. If my mother had been with us she would have rushed to the shirt and held cold compresses to the stain. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a shadow in the yellow light of the evening. I thought a cloud had passed over the sun. Theresa came right up to the screen and pressed her hands against it, around her face. “Is anyone home?” she asked. Her voice was so small I wondered if she hoped we were gone.
The stain had gotten smeared and was worse than it had been at the start. In the weeks that Alice had been gone I had done my best to keep up appearances. If we let ourselves fall apart the neighbors, or the police, might descend upon us and pick our bones clean. Even though I had vacuumed and disposed of old tuna cans for the sake of normalcy, there
were certain tasks I didn’t do well. For one thing, I was not in harmony with the soiled shirt, the way my mother would have been. For another, I couldn’t work up sympathy for extraneous items such as throw rugs. Why wash the table, sweep the floor, settle the rugs, swab the counter after every meal, when we’re coming back within four hours to disrupt what I’ve labored over to make right? I ask the question only half-jokingly. Alice always said I had a high threshold for filth and squalor. When we first knew each other in Ann Arbor she had me pegged as a nose picker in the car, the kind of person who wipes his hand under the seat if there isn’t a Kleenex. I said, “What’s the alternative?” She looked over her sunglasses at me as if the answer was obvious. She used to occasionally get on the bandwagon after she’d been with Theresa for an evening. She’d rail on, something about how my household dysfunction was a habit my mother had nurtured in me from infancy. There’d been clear female boundaries in my birthplace, she said, across which males did not venture. I assume she meant the chain-link fence around the broom closet and the dishwasher. So I was cultivated to be an unremorseful slob. Dairying has only reinforced my natural tendencies. I’m outside all day long, in dirt and dung and chaff. It’s unwieldy in nature, no cap on dust, or broken machines that must come to rest somewhere. There’s no end to bailing twine, rusty nails, old fencing materials a person might someday want to use again. Beyond a certain point I’ve given up trying to bring about order.
“We’re in here,” I said to Theresa as I opened the door. I wondered if she knew about Alice’s arrest. I wondered if she was going to quote some Scripture or put my eye out. She looked around herself as she set foot in the door. She saw, I guess in one penetrating glance, that I’d been doing the best I could. She saw that my best effort wasn’t worth much.
“I’ve been trying to get a cherry stain out of Emma’s white T-shirt,” I said, to explain why everything else had gone by the wayside.
“Let me,” she said, reaching for the dish towel in my hand. “Hold still, Em.” I relaxed some then, figuring that if she was going to worry over a spot, she might not know. She kneeled, massaging the shirt for a minute. “This isn’t going to work,” she said. “Boil water, Howard. For a fruit stain you pour hot water from above. You hold it way up—there’s
something about pouring from a distance that makes a difference. It’s all in the heat and distance.”
“Heat and distance,” I repeated. “Better take off the shirt, Emma.” I filled the kettle at the sink and then walked across the room to the stove. “Here,” I said on my way, pulling out a stool for Theresa. After I fiddled with the temperamental knob on the one working burner I went to the table and stood across from her, trying to casually lean on a chair with my elbows.
We watched Emma taking off her shirt, trying to work her way around the wet spots so they wouldn’t touch her face. I couldn’t remember ever having been alone with Theresa before, without other adults. I can’t say I actually knew her outside of the context, the strictures, of other people’s associations with her. She was my wife’s good friend. She was my neighbor’s wife. She was the mother of our children’s playfellow. If our families had dinner together, Dan and I would often stand outside before the meal was ready. We’d talk about whether I should buy the new high-tensile wire fences or stick with what I had, about the Potawatomi Indians, about storm systems, local history, town politics, national politics, the Brewers, the achievements of our daughters. At dinner, around the table, Alice might get off and running about doing something commonplace. She could make a transaction at the walk-up window at First Federated in downtown Prairie Center sound as elemental as a Greek tragedy. She’d fling her arms around, raving. Her hair would come out of its band. Sometimes I’d rein her in. She tended to see the world in black and white, and if I’d make a remark about how the bank manager wasn’t actually evil, that he was forced to be conservative because of federal banking regulations, she’d lower her eyes and pinch up her lips, butter a piece of bread. Theresa would urge Alice to go on, to continue the story. It was always Theresa who would say something lighthearted and probably true. “Don’t pay any attention to that man,” she’d say, laughing at me. “Men, they know too many details for their own good.” With modest prodding Alice would continue, looking to the right of me. She meant to tell her story only for the benefit of our neighbors.
Emma had removed her shirt. The three of us stood watching the coil under the teapot turn orange, as if the electric stove had the mesmerizing power of a campfire.
“What is this about, Howard?” Theresa had a naturally soft voice. When she spoke, a person had to watch her mouth to understand what she was saying.
“What?” I asked.
“How are you?”
How was I? I needed to get Alice out of the county jail. I needed to work. I was spending the day walking in circles, getting close to nothing done. I needed to care for Emma and Claire, and protect them. I made them take naps in the afternoon so I could rest from their noise. They were then wide awake half the night. We had run out of food and I didn’t know if I had the energy to drive far enough away to buy groceries. It seemed that the world beyond the farm was itself floating farther and farther from us. I wasn’t sure I was going to meet the month’s payment, let alone come anywhere near the bond or Rafferty’s fee. I wasn’t at all sure that our cows were going to have anything to eat in the coming winter, or for the rest of the summer, for that matter. I was hungry myself. “I’m fine,” I think I said.
“I’m so upset about this,” she whispered across the table. She was taking quick, short breaths so she wouldn’t cry. She rolled her eyes and pushed her glasses up. “We only got home this afternoon. We took longer than we planned. I hate this country. I walked in the door—I nearly tripped over the stack of papers in the hall. I’m standing reading, saying out loud, ‘What?
What?’
And who should come along but Suzannah Brooks, of course, the model Christian, making sure I’ve heard the dirt. When she said ‘Robbie Mackessy’ I just shut my mouth and closed the door.”
I put my hand to my lips, to make her stop talking. I didn’t want her to say anymore in front of Emma.
“If I’d been here I could have prevented this, I just know it. I would have insisted on interviewing Robbie. I would have talked to the police. I know the Mackessys—I’ve had them in therapy. Give me four, five hours, and I could tell you their troubles. Carol’s parents, both of them, were profoundly deaf. I mean, they’d never heard a thing. They had about six kids and every single one of them ran wild. Carol never said exactly, but I’ve a feeling that her two older sisters are—”
“Let’s talk later—” I began.
She was skipping from thing to thing, literally rattling on. She was shaking both hands, spitting as she spoke. “Robbie is an accomplished liar! I’ve seen children like him who will do anything to manipulate his family. His mother has given him plenty of opportunities to build his conman skills. When I told Dan that Alice had been arrested, that she was in jail, he said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’
Don’t worry about it!
Can you believe it? That man is practically unconscious. When I told him I was coming down here he said, ‘That’s probably not a good idea, Theresa. You know how people talk.’ Do you see what I mean? He’s lost his senses! I put it to him: I said, ‘They’re in trouble, so they’re not our friends anymore?’ The worst of it is, I don’t have a clue how to help him. It’s my business to tend people who are suffering. If he was a patient, a stranger, I would say the right words. Oh God, I don’t know. I’ve seen this kind of thing before, Howard. Someone makes an accusation and the judge can’t dismiss it because it’s so loaded. The press, the parents, the civic leaders get all sanctimonious about believing the children. The school nurse! It would kill the poor judge’s career if he let Alice walk the streets.” She quit talking and bared her teeth. She squeezed her eyes shut and let off some steam with a guttural,
“Gaaahhhh.”
“Emma, go upstairs and get a clean shirt on,” I said. She stood at the head of the table, fixed on Theresa.
“And Myra Flint, the child protection worker—they put Myra Flint on Robbie? This whole thing is like a bad joke, like a caricature of the system. I mean Myra, if you haven’t been abused in this life she’ll sniff it out in past lives or future lives. Robbie has a lot of symptoms of a character-disturbed child, and you know what? Myra Flint isn’t going to see that! Robbie is going to wrap that woman around his little finger, I’ll bet you. I’ll bet you money on that one. And Mrs. Mackessy will do the same. I get so frustrated trying to treat people like the Mackessys because they don’t want help. Some people actually work to make changes, once in a rare while. But Carol had no interest in figuring herself out. None. She wanted what she wanted. She’d go off on weekends to—”