“It’s true,” she said. She wasn’t out of breath. She wasn’t smiling.
“Theresa! Theresa!” Emma cried. “We’re playing hobos. My dad says we’re going to hop trains and eat rabbits raw.”
Theresa nodded, although I don’t think she heard Emma. She looked at me, and lowering her voice she said, “I’ve gotten a letter from her every day this week. She’s terrified you’re going to sell the farm. She mentioned the possibility to Rafferty and he blew his circuits.”
“She always knows,” I said.
Theresa put one foot in front of the other and came that much closer. “Even though Rafferty got an extension the trial is only two—two and a half months away. She’s dealing with it. God knows how I’m going to explain that I haven’t taken the girls. I haven’t even made an attempt—”
“I’m not going to explain,” I snapped.
“Are you okay?” She came into the room and stood over me. Her eyes welled up with tears.
“Look,” I said, “we can’t stay here anymore. It’s so obvious I don’t know why I have to explain to you or to her. People don’t recover from this kind of charge. We’ll have to sell even if she’s acquitted. I think Alice is concentrating on surviving and she hasn’t taken into consideration the fact that we’re finished here. It’s over.” I started past Theresa into the kitchen. I turned, took her hand, kissed it. She stepped away and put both her hands behind her back. I shrugged and sat down. “Alice used to be so worried about certain people talking about her,” I said. “She used to think that old ladies were going to blab about her. I used to tell her to cut it out, that it was senseless to pay attention to rumor mongers. Now I see what there is to be afraid of: Talk. That’s it. Talk.
“And I don’t know why we ever thought we could farm here. A person needs community. I call up to Madison every time I think of doing something different. I want to ridge till, or start rotational grazing, I have to call a bloody academic. If we wanted to build a barn there’d be nobody to come for the raising. What am I talking about, anyway? There isn’t any
such thing anymore. A barn. It would be a pole shed, not a wooden post-and-beam beauty. In Iowa all the farms are owned by about five corporations. There’s no future in the family farm. None. All the farmers were moving out of here just about the time we arrived. To this town we’re some city people who stepped in where we don’t belong. I used to think there were rules of nature. Strict rules. If you broke them you’d pay. But of course nature doesn’t give a damn about anything. It’s our own codes that are arbitrary, merciless. What’s wrong with us, that we don’t want a ranch house with a big round metal pool in the yard? Nobody cares that this ground means something to me, that I get satisfaction knowing that below our garden there used to be a path that the teamsters used. They brought their supplies into Prairie Junction with their wagons and oxen. You go out there and squint and you can just about see those fucking oxen.”
“If it means so much to you then you should stay,” she said. She was leaning over the table, about to take hold of my shoulder. Before she reached she thought better of it. “People have short memories. This will look like you’re running. Rafferty says—”
“I don’t care what Rafferty says! Do you understand? I don’t care what he says!” I was shouting in her face.
“You have a right to be here,” she said softly.
Claire distracted us by running into the kitchen and grabbing Theresa’s leg. “Is it time to go to your house?”
“No,” I said.
Claire, who had always been so even tempered, sat down on the floor and proceeded to bang her head against the cabinet.
“Oh, sweetie,” Theresa crooned, kneeling down and putting her arms around her, “it’s all right.”
“I want to go to your house,” Claire sobbed. “It’s cold there.”
“Let’s walk down to the pond,” Theresa said, looking up at me, but talking still to Claire. “You and Emma can play in the sand and wade. I can see you need to cool off. Isn’t that a good idea?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said.
“Look at your girls,” she commanded. “They are hot and uncomfortable. Claire has prickly heat on her neck, and down her back. She’s dirty,
Howard. The pond shouldn’t be shut up, like someone’s ghostly bedroom. There’s no sense in the girls thinking it’s a bad place. There’s just no sense in that.”
I started to say that it was August already and that we’d used the pond every day to survive the heat. She was herding my children out the door, patting their heads, telling them she’d missed them. How many times, I wondered, had we, Alice and I, and Emma and Claire, walked the lane in the middle of a summer afternoon? We had thought of the pond as our perk. We didn’t have jobs that offered health insurance or a lunch tab, a company car, box seats at the sports arena. We had slow time on July days. Hot and sleepy, we used to make our way to the water’s edge. In that hour or two there never seemed to be anything to hurry for. I used to trick myself into thinking there wasn’t a mountain of work waiting for me at all points beyond the clearing.
Theresa stood, looking at the water while the girls ran to get the buckets we kept stashed in the hollow of a log. They peeled off their clothes, down to their underpants. I buckled them into their life jackets. I made them wear the jackets in spite of the fact that they both knew how to swim. It was ridiculous because they couldn’t go under water very well with the vests on.
“This is where she is for me,” Theresa said. “I could never explain to Dan that the pond isn’t sinister. It’s just water. My heart hurts like wild every time I come up from the woods. You know everything—that I feel like I’m going to die with the hurt. But I’m drawn here, too. I have to come. And I believe, Howard, that the place needs to be peopled. I have the feeling she is here and that life needs to go on, in this setting, so she won’t get lonely, so she’ll be a part of us.”
We sat on two rusty metal chairs that had been down at the pond for probably a good thirty years. I knew I should do something to stop whatever she was going to say next. I was leaving Prairie Center. We were going. I should thank her for Sandy Brickman and Mrs. Reesman. She had done a brilliant job, sending down those two women to rescue me. She had also marched into police headquarters and told the investigators to lay off Alice.
Thank you
should have wrapped it up.
I braced myself when she took a deep breath. “Howard.” She said my name as if it were an imported chocolate. The sound of it made me cringe.
“At first,” she said, “I told myself that that night wasn’t important, that it didn’t matter.”
“Yep,” I mouthed, trying to concur.
“No, actually, at first I was scared to death, that I’d broken a Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not covet anything that is thy neighbor’s.’ It was the words that horrified me, isn’t that the limit? I’m a good Catholic girl at heart and I guess I always will be. After I’d gotten over the fright of the individual sentences, I kept thinking of that night as a mistake. But I just can’t believe it anymore. It was spiritual for both of us, I know it was. The impulse was one of love, of purity. It was a rare sort of intimacy. Rare.” She nodded, agreeing with herself. “I’m not going to say any more about it. I believe what I just said and I always will.” She was staring at my profile. I could feel her eyes on me while I watched the girls frolicking in a place that seemed polluted. “I’m sorry that I haven’t come down, haven’t taken Emma and Claire. I felt so mixed up for a while. I just didn’t think I could see you.
“Dan came home from his conference the next night. I screamed right away, the second he walked in the door, that either he had to talk to me or I would leave him. We had a fight. He accused me of breaking down everywhere I go and I yelled at him about how he is in denial the likes of which I have never seen in all my professional days, and that one of these mornings he was going to wake up and realize his heart was broken in spite of himself, that that was going to be far worse than knowing you have a broken heart and tending your hurt. I told him we wouldn’t tiptoe around him anymore, that we weren’t going to pretend we were fine. I said I cried to everyone else because I was scared out of my wits to even say her name, to say, ‘Lizzy,’ in front of him. I’ve been afraid that I’ll make one slip and he’ll break. You know that. I said it killed me to see him suffering, it hurt so much to begin with, and then with his pain on top of it. I feel sometimes, like I’m carrying everyone’s pain. That’s why I’ve had to go bawling around.” She was so close to my face I could smell her. “My God,” she said, “he nearly cracked up at the kitchen table. About all he’d let me do is keep ahold of his arm. Finally, finally he started to talk about it. He said he couldn’t stand Lizzy being only a memory. He said he just hadn’t gotten enough of her, that he hardly knew her. He has been trying to find some way he can carry her presence
forward, trying to connect her with our life now. He hates the photographs because they are so flat and still.… With you,” she murmured, “with you there was all that sorrow, you know?”
We were going to leave Prairie Center. We’d be gone as soon as I could settle the lease for the unit.
“With Dan there is so much anger. He’s still furious with me because I let the girls come down here that day. And of course that makes me secretly fume, because when did he ever have to arrange for child care? He gets himself out of bed and goes to work every day, never even has to think about making time for himself, or planning around the family. There’s no point in bringing all that up. Who cares about it anymore? But you see, he’s not reasonable. He’s mad because I got my tubes tied! I got the ligation after Lizzy was born—I mean, we had both decided two was enough. Well, anyway, it was one of those, what do you call them—What? I’m going senile. You know, one of those—cathartic experiences. I have one more cathartic experience it’ll probably do me in. We screamed and cried. The next morning he stayed around for a while, though, and we, all of us, talked about Lizzy. I sat down at breakfast and said, ‘Remember how Lizzy called the neighbor’s dog, Mutt-we?’ Audrey looked terror stricken. And then when Dan started to laugh and say how funny that was, I could see her breathing this tremendous sigh of relief.”
She was looking out at the pond now, at the girls instead of at me. “After he left for work I said to myself, Howard means nothing to me. It was a fluke. A dream. I thought of calling my old friend Father Albert and confessing. I’m not sure exactly what I would have confessed, but he always tells me at least one thing that changes my life. He’d probably tell me too, that it was time I turned my thoughts homeward, to draw close to Dan and Audrey. I was pretty sure that you would have woken up and felt as strange as I did—”
“Right,” I said.
“But as the day wore on I kept thinking about you. Damn you,” she whispered, laughing out at the water. “So, all right, all right, a week, two weeks have passed. I see you everywhere I go. I see you out the kitchen window. I see you in my closet, I see you in the glass of the coffee table. I dream that I’m riding up and down elevators trying to find you. I love you, you know that?” She turned back to look at my profile. “It doesn’t
matter in our day-to-day life, I know. Maybe it’s the displacement of the love I have for Lizzy. Maybe I’m giving that to you. It doesn’t matter, because there’s nothing to be done. It’s just one of those things I want to shout from the rooftops.”
I continued to watch the girls’ every move.
“So, I love you, Howard,” she said again. “You are a good person—you are everything that’s good.”
I rolled my eyes and snarled. I was about to say that that was the sort of crap sixteen-year-olds drool into each other’s ears. I made the mistake of looking at her. Her face was pink, bright. I think it was the hope in her expression, in her half-smile, that momentarily chastened me. “No, I’m not.” I shook my head. And then I thought of something that might be true. “When I was a kid,” I said, “I used to think that bravery involved action. It took courage, I figured, to move forward, to pursue a dream, to get ahead in the world. Just to get where you were supposed to. I thought having desire took courage. Now I realize that none of that requires bravery. The only thing you really need bravery for is standing still. For standing by.”
I put my hand on her cheek. She closed her eyes and gasped a little, leaning into my fingers. She was making her cheek as if to hold my hand. I didn’t feel as if I had the strength to stand up. To walk back to the house. To wait and wait for Alice to get out. To wait and wait through the years in some strange town with my daughters and my wife.
Chapter Sixteen
——
T
HE TRANSACTION WITH
M
RS
. Reesman was not complete until the middle of September. The land had to be surveyed and assessed by the bank. The water had to be tested. The Boy Scout officials and their legal counsel had to give their approval. They came out twice to inspect their future camp. Arnold L. Reesman III visited several times in his Eddie Bauer outdoorsman costume to walk the property. He confided that his mother knew what she wanted within five minutes of laying her eye on a thing, and that it was his job to do the delving. They’d looked at quite a few properties, he said, most of them farther away from the city, in crowded lake communities, or in distant tracts of dense woods that offered little more than ticks or mosquitoes. His mother had a knack for spotting quality, and although she was usually right about her decisions, there were exceptions. Take the row houses on the east side of Milwaukee, for instance, that she was just about to sign on when he’d discovered radon so thick in the basement the air was yellow. I didn’t talk much beyond pointing out the interesting geological features of our farm. I didn’t say that radon is invisible. The exertion of walking under the summer sun in pants and hiking boots
brought color into Arnold’s pallid face and left him panting. He had a clean handkerchief in his pocket to wipe the fine beads of sweat from his brow.
He conceded that the farm was an excellent property. He was going to get a lot of enjoyment out of it once he hacked some trails here and there. I wondered how long the land would sustain his interest before he was off on one of his exotic fishing vacations. I had once, in a moment of sentiment, almost told him about the teamsters, about the fellow who built the house, the boy who fell off the hay wagon. I half wanted to show him the abstract and the journal. In the next instant I thought about the trunk. I realized then that those things in the trunk belonged to the farm and that it was only right to leave them for Arnold to discover. He could go down for coffee at Del’s and get the whole story. I would leave everything to chance, to what, in my younger days, I’d thought of as, “the Guiding Hand of Chance.” Perhaps, if Arnold was subject to whimsy, if he was a closet sap, the relics would tickle his fancy. The objects in the trunk, after all, and the trunk itself, were not much without the associations: the barn, the fields, the hint of wagon-wheel ruts that a person could still make out if they wanted to enough. The trunk was like a fish out of water by itself, something that was dead.