They eat their dinner at the customary time, prompting the children to clean their plates in the usual way, the usual number of times. A certain amount of food is left uneaten to be packed for Paul's lunch the next day, and Lavinia and Mae scrape and wash the dishes in silence. When the table is wiped and the floor swept, Mae hangs their aprons together on the hook on the back of the kitchen door and they settle in the living room with Paul and the children, each with their solitary occupations. Mae takes up the sock she is knitting from the basket beside her chair. Her thoughts do not wander as they usually do; she jabs the needles into the sock as if her only purpose in knitting is to try to distract herself from a period of agitated waiting, as if she will soon be called in to the doctor's examination room. She looks up occasionally at Lavinia and then at Paul. She knows what each of them must be thinking, the speeches they are rehearsing even now in their heads that they will deliver to her once the children are in bed. She could be difficult, she thinks, she could interrupt and say their respective speeches for them. She could serve their very thoughts, every reason and justification, up to them and watch the astonishment overtake their faces. She could, but she won't, she thinks; she'll hold her tongue. There would only be more dismay at her impudence.
Mae puts the children to bed herself, early, so as to not prolong their waiting, and returns to her chair. She takes up her knitting again without looking Paul or Lavinia in the eye, knowing that they will wait, silent, until they are certain all three children are asleep before they each say their piece on the subject of moving. Sitting together like this should be a comfortable thing, Mae thinks. But the ticking of the mantel clock seems too loud, and she's bracing for the moment when the mechanism will catch and the clock will sound the quarter hour. Paul's turning the pages of his newspaper should be so familiar a sound that she forgets to hear it, the way she forgets to hear her own breathing or the rustling of leaves in trees. She should forget to hear the clicking of Lavinia's and her knitting needles because she hears it nearly every evening, but the click- clicking has turned sharp, like an angry finger tapping on wood. Once the quarter hour and then nine o'clock have struck, Mae goes upstairs, first to Ruby's room and then to the boys', to listen to their breathing. Ruby sleeps curled up on her side, with one foot outside the covers, as she does every night. Ellis is on his side with his back to the room, exactly like Ruby, and Little Homer is on his back, breathing loudly through his open mouth.
Mae stands in the doorway of the boys' room, looking at them in their beds. She feels an overwhelming sadness when she sees that Ellis is not merely lying on his side; he is curled up tight, turned in on himself, and wary of uncoiling, like the pill bugs he jabs on the sidewalk. That Little Homer lies motionless and slack-mouthed, struck senseless by sleep as only a young child can be, is no comfort. He'll be twisting himself into a coil on the bed like the others soon enough. She resists the urge to enter the room and touch each boy as she usually does, barely resting her fingertips on their covers. She resists the urge again when she passes Ruby's door.
Paul is the first to speak when she's back downstairs and seated in her chair with her knitting. His paper refolded and laid beside him on the davenport, he says, “This can't last forever. It simply cannot go on like this forever, maybe even not much longer. People will see that. They have to, eventually. What if we moved and didn't do as well in a new place as we could do here by staying? We'd be well and truly stuck, then. We couldn't come back.”
Mae keeps at her knitting, calmer now, grateful that she has her work to look at and does not to have to meet Paul's eyes while he speaks. What will she say herself, she wonders, if she says anything in all of this? What would Bess have said if she'd told her she intended to move away forever? Bess, oh, Bess. She'd have said, “You can't move away, you know,” but she would have said it with a sad smile and she would have helped Mae with packing and she would have been there when they finally drove off for California, her hand waving high as long as she could still see the car, as long as Mae could see her.
Mae can feel them both watching her, Paul with his hands folded and Lavinia with her hands resting in her lap, still holding onto her own knitting.
“I don't like the thought of leaving this place, however unpleasant it has gotten to be here at the moment,” Lavinia says. “My family are all from these parts. The children are the fourth generation to be born here. You'd be telling them to start over from scratch, too, you know. I don't think any one of them would say yes if you asked if they wanted to leave this place. Their whole lives are here, and they can't imagine anything else. As for me, you might think my selling the farm would make it easy for me to leave, but I can tell you it doesn't. Even if another family is out there now, working my grandfather's land, even if the house my father built got blown to kingdom come, I wouldn't want to leave it. I'd no sooner leave that land behind than I'd leave the family plots behind. There wouldn't be a soul left to tend those graves. Your family plot, too. We three sitting here in this room and those three children asleep upstairs are the very last of the Walkers, the Mitchells, and the Graves in these parts. The very last.”
The justifications continue like a radio play Mae has heard before. She wonders how all of this would sound to another person, someone entirely unrelated and unknown to them, hearing each argument for the first time. What am I now, Mae wonders, what is the sum of me? What am I, she wants to ask, if I cannot continue here and you will not leave with me? What can I possibly fill this emptiness with, if I cannot fill it with myself?
Mae feels as if she is receding from the room, as if she is being drawn backward into a tunnel, watching the circle of light that holds the picture of Paul and Lavinia sitting there together on the davenport fade in brightness and grow smaller. She wonders if they can see her receding, if they can still make out the placid expression she wears on her face or the color of the ball of yarn in her lap. She can still just make out their voices saying things like
couldn't hold my head up
, and
ride it out
, but all she sees in that circle of fading light are a prideful man and a frightened old woman.
She had thought while she waited for this moment, waited all day for this moment, that she would feel more desperate when it came. It surprises her, this feeling of understanding that's coming over her and the way it's spreading out from her core like warmth. She wants to hold very still while it's happening, even to slow her breathing to prolong the moment of realization. If she were to inhale deeply or even simply point her needle through the next loop of yarn it would be gone. She's aware now of a sensation of intense relief, as if she's lain down, cold and exhausted in her bed and has realized she is beginning to get warm, that it is time to submit to sleep.
Mae hears Paul's voice asking her, “Do you see?” and she feels herself nodding a little without looking up or altering the expression on her face.
Yes
, she could say,
it's all quite clear. It wasn't clear before, but it is now. You won't leave. You won't save yourselves and you won't let me save you. But I can make you leave. I've got one last coin to spend
.
Mae is tired suddenly, overcome by weariness, and there's nothing more she'd like than to lie down right here on the floor. The fire in the fireplace would burn unattended for a long while and the others could simply leave her there when they were tired enough to go to bed. She could lie with her face against the cool wooden boards and watch the fire, watch it diminish and fade like the light in the lanterns that people set out all over town those first nights after the storm. The lanterns that cast their feeble light a few feet in each direction, struggling to illuminate houses and people that were no longer there. People disappear sometimes, Mae thinks. A wind snatches a baby from its mother's arms, a mother becomes exhausted and stops trying to live, a father's heart simply breaks. You can watch it happening if you're brave enough to look, if you don't avert your eyes in that brief moment before the lantern's precious, fragile light ceases flickering and goes out.
P
aul leans back with his hands still on the steering wheel and looks out across the January fields.
“I don't like it, Mother,” he says. “Why can't I just pull off the road up ahead there and come with you?”
“Because I don't want you to, that's why.”
“Well, I think I need to. I don't like the idea of leaving you out here, even if it is for just an hour.”
“Two.” Lavinia gets out of the Ford and shakes her head at Paul. “One and you'd no sooner get home than you'd have to turn right around and come back for me. Two hours. I am dressed in every last woolen thing I could find, and I will be fine.”
Paul opens his mouth to speak, but then closes it again in frustration and simply gestures at the white expanse in front of them.
“I was born on this land, and so were you, for that matter,” Lavinia says. “I'm surprised at you. I thought you knew I was just a tough old farm girl.”
Lavinia slams the car door shut, takes a step back, and nods at Paul who holds up two fingers and mouths the word two at her until she flaps a hand at him as is she's shooing off a fly.
“Land sakes. You'd think I was a child.” She stands watching until he's driven off in the direction they came and sounded his horn.
But when she turns to continue up the road, she finds she must fight to keep her mittened hands in her coat pockets, to keep them from flying to her face to cover her mouth and stifle the choking sobs that have overtaken her. She keeps walking with her back straight, managing not to shudder so that when Paul looks back at her in the Ford's mirror, as he certainly will, he will see no reason to turn around and come after her. She can cry all she wants to out here, as loud as she wants. There's no one to see or hear her. This thought provokes a wet sputter that becomes a laugh and Lavinia wipes her eyes and nose with the hankie she has ready in her coat pocket.
“In all my yearsââ” she says aloud. Who would have believed she'd one day ask to be let off on this county road in the middle of January to wander alone for two hours before being fetched home? Who would have believed that this particular landscape could be so altered? She'd known that many of the farmhouses and outbuildings would be gone, but the stand of willows along the river is gone, too, and without them there in the distance she is utterly lost. She could be anywhere.
There's nothing to do but walk to keep warm. She checks her wristwatch and decides that she will simply walk west and, after one hour, turn and walk back east again until she meets Paul on the road. There's no wind to speak of, but there's no sun, either, and she's beginning to feel the cold. The sky is solid grey. Lavinia thinks it will likely snow. She's regarded these very fields often enough in winter, but always from inside. When there was outside work for her to do on the farm in winter, she'd always hurried along and done it and saved staring into the distance for the window over the kitchen sink. The white, sleeping fields reaching out endlessly from the house, the sleeves of her old, blue cardigan pushed up for work, the click of the vegetable peeler on the slick, white ball of potato in her hand, the coffee pot and her cup still left to wash. A glimpse of Homer from the window.
This landscape that had always seemed benign, even in the harshest winters, stretches out away from her now, austere and heedless. Lavinia had always believed that the land remembered. It had been her way of explaining the seasons to herself when she was a child: the delighted shock she felt each spring at finding crocus leaves piercing the last crust of snow, and the corn's yearly progress from a green haze of seedlings to a forest so towering and expansive a child could be lost in it. Then the stalks would stand in their rows, brittle and dignified as old men who have refused a chair, waiting for the harvest. There had always been summers that were too dry, springs that were too wet, spindly and even stunted crops, but each year, good or bad, her father had brought the crops in and turned the soil and the earth had remembered that it was time to sleep. Lavinia had watched all this as a child from the house her father had built and then as a bride when Homer came to live in that house and work beside her father in the fields. It had been sufficient, and she had wanted nothing else.
She thought she'd braced herself for this, for seeing that the storm had indeed erased almost every sign that she'd lived most of her life here on this land. Lavinia's father had lived out his entire life here and had often repeated the story of Lavinia's grandfather arriving in Illinois from the east, he and his bride both all of eighteen, traveling further and further south until they found themselves in Little Egypt, where they'd agreed it was time to stop wandering. Lavinia's grandfather had liked the look of the land, and he thought that names like Little Egypt and The Big Muddy had a certain weight, a ring of significance that was equal to what he had now left forever behind him back East. Lavinia had always been sure she looked at the land as her grandfather had, that she felt what he had felt when he first laid eyes upon it.
Didn't I live here?
she wants to shout now.
Didn't I have this soil under my fingernails and on my knees? Didn't I force this land to give us food?
The landscape now seems purely hostile; she cannot conjure her former pride. The winter fields had always moved her beforeââmore, in their way, than they did in summerââbecause of the unspoken promise between the farmer and the land, because of the abundance that would surely follow the thaw. This notion curls her lip now, even as she sullenly acknowledges it was the wind that changed the land and not the land that changed itself to spite her.