Mae's father had never warned her away from her mother. He'd relied on Mae to go to her mother when he couldn't stand to go himself. “She needs you,” meant that likely as not that her mother had made an attempt to come downstairs and then had frozen, mid-way on the staircase with her eyes down and her head cocked at a peculiar angle, tapping the banister with a fingertip. Mae would stand beside her mother until she'd finished and then distract her, or try to, before she got stuck tugging on a curtain that was already closed, letting go and then tugging again. Sometimes her father would manage on his own to wait her mother out and then would sit her down next to him on the davenport and hold both her hands so that there might be a chance of conversation. But then increasingly, toward the end of her mother's life, his face would simply fall and he'd hurry from the room because the heartbreaking choice between seeing her and pretending that he didn't see was no choice at all.
They had turned inward, the three of them, in most ways over the years because it had been easier to do so. Slowly at first, then quickly, her mother's pleasures had receded until she no longer noticed the trumpet vines winding up the white porch columns and no longer cared to put her raspberries up as jam. She even left the piano music Mae's father still ordered for her from St. Louis standing unopened and unplayed on the upright. Unable to risk sitting down at the bench, afraid she'd be trapped by lining up the edges of the sheet music or counting the keys and never manage to play a single note, she had simply stood in front of the piano and looked at the music instead. All of this had made her mother's habit of going outside to look at the moon on clear nights in any season something of a miracle when you considered that she had stopped going out for much of anything else.
And now Mae's breathing, her beating heart, this house, even Little Homer's weight on her and the chair she's sitting on all feel like lengths of rope, stretched out taut and holding her to earth. “I thought it would amount to more than this, too,” she says in a quiet voice. She's crying now but she makes no attempt to dry her face. It's another burden, to carry regret. Mae wonders if regret is really the word she's looking for. You can regret that your life is not what it could have been, not what you'd hoped it would be. But to regret a thing is to say that you should have chosen otherwise and did not. It must be called something else when circumstances force a change upon you. Then, perhaps, you mourn a thing or even deplore it. If so, then Mae mourns the change the storm has brought upon the town and the people in it. She deplores the knowledge that her life here has become intolerable and that she feels she must leave and go somewhere else. She feels certain she will never regret it if she does.
She mourns, too, that there's so little left of her mother and father, so little evidence that they lived their lives out in this town. One daughter, three grandchildren, and two names on a headstone in the Mitchell family plot. They had only been alive for a year after Ruby was born; Ellis and Homer had never known them at all, which unfairly made it seem as if they didn't belong to each other in the same way. Mae thinks she sees flashes of both her parents in her children's faces from time to time, something in an expression or the angle of the head, but when she looks in the photo album at the portraits of her mother and father taken when they were children, she wonders each time what on earth it was she thought she saw, because they are not alike at all.
It seems clear, then, that although each person is marked by the life they have led, by each sight and taste, the imprint they leave is not theirs to decide. Mae can carry with her the knowledge that her mother had always seen the picture of a girl smelling a flower on the face of the moon. She can stand outside with Paul and point, she can draw it on paper, she can do her best to make him understand that all this is terribly important in describing her mother, and he will still stand smiling and shaking his head, because he cannot see it and he never will.
She'd given up with Paul long ago, but then tonight Little Homer had surprised her and made her mother's imprint vivid again. The surprise of it was key. Like the tiny snake Mae had once seen pressed into the surface of a dirt road, flattened by the tire of a passing automobile. She could easily have missed it, walking along, but she'd happened to look down and the strange sight of it had made her stop. It couldn't have been there longââshe could see the shape of its head and body and the pattern on its back quite clearly. It's scales had been iridescent in the light coming through the trees, and the snake was as beautiful a thing as Mae had ever seen. It had seemed an odd notion, but she'd thought at the time that the snake's skin had been iridescent precisely and only because it had been ironed out flat, and that, alive, it would have seemed a more ordinary thing. Imprinted on the road, jewel-like, it was a memory; unburdened of its flaws and more beautiful than it actually was.
The imprint of child on mother, and mother on child. What was she before I was born, Mae wonders, shifting Homer's weight on her lap. What was I before you? It's barely a question, Mae thinks, since it can have no possible answer. It's just time, after all, carrying you along and opening your eyes so that you can see the people gathered around you at your birth and watch as they're carried along with you, watch as they fade away in their turn. And at the end there are still people around you, the ones you have gathered to yourself who will be carried along in turn as you subside.
Mae looks at the boards of the porch floor, now dark, and realizes she doesn't know when Paul turned out the light. He will have left a light on in the upstairs hall so that she can see her way to bed. His switching off the lamp in the living room was nothing more than a signal that he had gone upstairs and that she could come in now without fear of having to talk to anyone. A signal that if he is not yet asleep when she comes in, he will not comment on the pretense when she gets into their bed quietly so as not to wake him. That he will not touch her first.
Mae shrugs the blanket off from around her shoulders. She'll carry Little Homer back to his bed now. She'll look down as she walks through the house, avoiding mirrors and glass as she does, avoiding anything that shows her to herself. She'll leave the chair out on the porch, and the blanket, because she might still be unable to sleep. She might wake and want to steal back downstairs. She might wake again and spend the night feeling like her heart is full of pins.
L
avinia looks at Pastor Aufrecht sitting open-mouthed across from her, his fork forgotten in his hand, saying, “Surely not.” Her stomach sinks then with the realization that she must now convince him of something she had hoped he already knew to be true. She turns the cake off the server and onto her plate and looks back at him.
“Paul heard it himself from an old friend, standing right here in our backyard,” she says.
“Is it possible he misunderstood?”
She'd been waiting for this question. She supposes it's a fair one, and one a minister would be honor bound to ask. Still, she feels wretched at having to answer it. “I heard it myself, from inside the house. So did Mae. There's no mistake.”
“This is a very serious accusation.”
“I know it,” Lavinia says.
Aufrecht looks at her, blinking in his amazement. “People burned your lumber rather than use it? Whatever would possess them?”
“I believe they mean to ruin us.”
“I can't believe that,” Aufrecht says, shaking his head. He looks hard at Lavinia to see how deeply she believes it herself. “No,” he says to convince himself, even as anguish settles in his face.
“I wouldn't have believed it myself if I hadn't heard it with my own two ears. The children are even being taunted about it at school.”
“But why? Why do such a thing?”
Lavinia looks down at her plate, uncertain of what to say next, and when she says, “Mae thinks it's a punishment,” and Aufrecht only continues to stare at her in bafflement, she says, “A way of making us lose something, same as they did.”
They sit silent then, and Lavinia begins to eat small bits of her cake while Aufrecht only stares at his plate. She had been seeking advice when she asked him to pay this visit, hoping for comfort and reassurance, even to be told flat out that she was wrong. But Aufrecht's ignorance is making her relive those moments of listening through the window when Ben Eavers came to say his piece and all the moments since that night when she's had to hurry thoughts of Ben and Paul out of her mind. Ben and Paul coming and going along the road together, grown tall as men overnight but still really nothing more than spindly boys. Ben so often at her table, sitting between Paul and John, eating her food till the night he forgot himself and made them all laugh when he said, “Thank you, Mama,” after she cleared his empty plate from the table.
That the storm had been a reversal of fortune for the town had been evident, but Lavinia would never have believed it capable of turning old friends into cowards who faded back into doorways and shadows rather than behave honorably. Honor is the thing she keeps coming back to. She had believed herself to be surrounded by decent, honorable people, and now seeing them turn with such ease, seeming even to decide to turn their backs on the idea of honor, leaves her feeling only outrage and disgust.
“I never suspected anything like this,” Aufrecht finally says. “I look down at people's faces every Sunday, I look them right in the eye and shake all of their hands when they go out the door. Believe me, I've seen some terrible things in people's faces since the storm, but never this.”
“I didn't see it until it was pointed out to me.” Words run in a chain through Lavinia's headâârevenge, vengeance, retribution, reprisalââand she wonders if she failed to recognize the looks she was seeing in people's eyes because she had never seen those looks before or whether she had simply been unwilling to recognize them.
“âHe feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside,'” she quotes with a wry smile and makes Aufrecht shake his head again.
“But not everyone. You can't believe that everyone feels this way. What do your friends say?”
Lavinia looks at him in frank disbelief. “When it's your friends coming to you after dark with news like this, a person doesn't go looking for their friends.”
“You're not friendless,” Aufrecht says.
“It certainly has begun to feel that way.”
Aufrecht pauses. “I assure you that you're not. Things will turn around. Folks are just too frightened or worried to take a stand.”
Lavinia takes up her cup and blows across the coffee, though she knows it's gone cold. “It amounts to the same thing.”
P
aul sits at the table watching the children stare out into the room, watching Lavinia put the serving dishes in the center of the table. A plate of cold sliced ham, scalloped potatoes bubbling in their dish, green beans shined up with butter and heaped in the old oval bowl. Mealtimes are mostly silent now, apart from saying grace. There's not much they need to say to each other at this time of day, and it's often easier to keep whatever news they might have to themselves, seeing as none of it's good.
“I want to donate some lumber,” he says, breaking the silence.
Lavinia folds her apron and lays it on the counter. When she goes to pull the curtains shut, Paul catches her eye. “It's darker outside than in,” Lavinia says. “I don't want to be on display while I'm eating my dinner.”
Paul has spoken his mind by way of a statement, although he phrased it as a wish and not as intent. He knows it was this that provoked his mother into closing the curtains. She'd heard the words “I want” as the loudest part of the sentence, and her closing the curtains was her way of beginning the discussion, of closing them in on themselves. Paul hopes now that the worst of it is over, that having unburdened himself of those surprising words, the dinner can be eaten with something like relief, the children can be excused from the table and not merely sent from it when their plates are clean, and that the three of them can sit together under the ceiling light at this table his father built and come to an agreement.
Lavinia picks up her knife and fork but then puts them down again on her plate and lays her hands in her lap. “We were sitting at this very table the night you boys asked your father for a loan to start up the lumberyard,” she says. “Do you remember?”
Paul feels a slight consternation at her turning the conversation like this, even if he is unsurprised. “Of course,” he says, knowing that in order to discuss the thing at all his mother might have to have her own place to begin.
“You surprised us both with that one.” Lavinia smiles, “Oh, don't mistake me; neither your father nor I thought you boys were interested in the farm. We knew it was just a matter of time before you went off on your own, but we'd guessed that you'd each strike out in a different direction. We believed you were too different to end up together, here. You see, we were determined that each of you should lead your own life, and we'd already resigned ourselves to the loss of the farm, so it came as quite a revelation, quite a relief when we learned that we'd guessed wrong and that the two of you had planned to stay together and only go as far as Marah.”
“But you weren't wrong. Not entirely.”
Lavinia watches Paul and the sad, fond smile that has overtaken his face.
“Johnny never wanted to live in Marah,” Paul says. “It was his idea to start up a lumberyard, but it was my idea to build it here. He'd been dreaming of California for years by then, ever since we were kids, and just never let on. I talked him out of it, or at least I thought I had. He'd wanted me to go out there with him all along. And even after I bought him out and they'd moved, he wanted me to sell up and move, too. I expect he still wants all of us out there.”