Lit Riffs (29 page)

“How about some music?” proposed Mr. Reed. “I’ll accompany you.”

“It’s late,” she said a bit more harshly than she intended. “We should go to bed.”

Olive and Mr. Reed studied one another; what would they do? The last thing Olive wanted was to grow to hate Mr. Reed. Oh, how cruel the tired heart can turn. She said, “I’ll make up the davenport for you.”

This arrangement brought immediate relief to Mr. Reed’s face. Soon Olive was asleep upstairs and Mr. Reed had curled into a ball on the davenport, clutching to his breast one of the eyelet pillows. Their routine was set, their marriage defined, and each was satisfied with the terms.

Tension arises from mismatched expectations, and now that Olive and Mr. Reed knew that each wanted—or, rather, did not want—the same thing, the two fell into secure companionship. They dined together but neither felt slighted if one or the other journeyed into town or down to Albany alone. There was no obligation to report to the other every thought or whim, every hunger and thirst, every bowel movement and eruption of gas. A level of civility uncommon to marriage defined their interaction; she continued to call him Mr. Reed and he knew never to enter her bedroom, and he never wanted to. The village of Cambridge speculated about the nature of their marriage, but the speculation was kindly and well-intended, acknowledging that Olive and Mr. Reed were happy; happier than most.

They began a series of soirees of song in the parlor, and invitations to these became coveted. People from across Washington County would perch upon the davenport, sipping tea and nibbling ham sandwiches, while Mr. Reed played the piano and Olive sang. When the guests were gone and the plates stacked in the sink, Olive and Mr. Reed embraced at the foot of the stairs and said good-night. Upon going to sleep Olive would reflect on the passage of time. She kept a notepad at her bedside and she would write down the bars of music that accompanied her dreams. In the morning Mr. Reed would play them, as if blowing upon them and bringing them to life.

She kept a kitchen garden similar to the one she had grown when she was a girl. Each year its bounty multiplied so that by late summer she and Mr. Reed delivered baskets of vegetables to the war widows across Washington County. There were tomatoes and snap beans and zucchini as big as forearms; in autumn, squashes and roots in such supply that together she and Mr. Reed built a bin in the basement to store them through the winter. Rose potatoes and yellow squash and leafy turnips and pearl onions and bloody sugar beets. Mr. Reed was a gardening novice but he was curious; he would work in the garden at Olive’s side, asking her what even the most common plant was. “
That?
Why that’s spinach.” She ordered seeds Mr. Reed had never heard of. “What’s that?” “Okra.” “And that?” “A gooseberry.” She would arrange the vegetables by shape and color in neat piles like at a market.

Sometimes in the late summer vegetables that even Olive couldn’t identify would rise from the earth: bulbs like billiard balls and strange fleshy tubers. “It must’ve got into the seed pack,” Olive would say. “Isn’t that the fun of a garden? You never know just what will pop up.” Dutifully Mr. Reed would carry the harvest to the basement. In the evenings Olive would sing her song cycles, refining them while Mr. Reed accompanied her. In the autumn she wrote a cycle of four songs about the apple, the potato, the pale cabbage, as big as a head, and the winter looming before them all.

One day she boiled a thin, crispy root without knowing what it was. Mr. Reed shrugged and declared it delicious nonetheless. Another time she served what she thought was a fingerling, but she couldn’t be sure. In late October, after all the vegetables were picked, they worked together clearing the beds before the first snow. They raked and hoed and turned the soil and they could see the ghost of their breath. When they finished the last of their work for the season, they returned to the warm kitchen for some tea. Mr. Reed, freeing himself from his coat, said, “Not a bad pair, are we?”

And on days when she did not feel like cooking or an errand kept her in the village, Mr. Reed happily entered the kitchen and lit the stove on his own. Such was the day—a day in late autumn when the world is drained of color and the sun is a smudge in the hard sky—when Olive came down with the season’s first flu. She took to bed in the late morning, achy and feverish. Downstairs she heard Mr. Reed cooking: the cupboards, the pans, the running water, the chopping knife. Olive was feeling weary and foggy in mind. She hovered upon the threshold of sleep for several hours. The skittering mouse, happy in the warm wall, brought comfort and memories. The sounds of Mr. Reed moving about the kitchen were comforting as well; Olive thought back to that night a few years before when Mr. Reed had turned up after the war. Never could she have imagined the ease with which they now lived. Just when you think life cannot change, it has a way of rearranging itself indeed: this was Olive’s thought as the flu, a nasty bout that had already sent the hardware store owner and the justice of the peace to the hospital, overtook Olive. She shivered and her cold sweat stained the pillows. Just before her mind became unclear, it occurred to her, for a brief moment, that she might die, but the thought was too far-fetched and her mind went numb. Soon, Mr. Reed had finished his cooking and he was calling from the foot of the stairs, “Olive, can I bring you anything?”

“Play some music. It’ll help me sleep.”

Mr. Reed’s fingers were slow and somber upon the keys, and his darkened tenor climbed the staircase wearily. He played one of her songs. It was as familiar as the voice in her head.

Olive drifted in and out of sleep and Mr. Reed’s singing guided her into its blackness. She spent the afternoon in the delirium of flu, mindlessly nibbling upon the corner of a pillow like a rabbit upon a root. Then at last she passed out and slept. Her sleep was long and uninterrupted and transported her.

Hours later Olive woke to a quiet house. The clock’s delicate chime told her it was the middle of the night. Unsure of something, she called for Mr. Reed. There was no reply: all was still except the busy mouse, scurrying relentlessly.

“Mr. Reed?” The mouse stopped. “Mr. Reed? Would you bring me a cup of tea?” She felt the urge to ask him to sit upon the bed and stroke her damp hand. He had never seen her bedroom, and any other night this would have brought a girlish flutter to Olive’s breast—her ability to preserve youth’s privacy. Except that the silence was frightening, as only silence in the countryside is. “Mr. Reed?”

The mouse replied by running the length of house.

She rose from bed and her footfall stopped the mouse, wherever he was. Olive imagined him twitching in the dark, the tiny mite of his heart pumping blood furiously. Silly creature, she told herself. Now she felt a bit stronger, the worst of the flu had passed. She descended the stairs with a restored presence of mind. Her keen eye peered deeply into the dark.

Olive was beginning to feel like her old self—soul fortified and erect!—until she found Mr. Reed lying in a heap on the floor, one cold dead hand reaching up the steps.

IV. AT SUNSET

This time there was an inquiry, a series of interviews, and a symphony of speculation. In the end Olive Reed wasn’t charged with poisoning her husband, but many people in Washington County doubted her innocence. “Picked, chopped, fried, and ate a castor root—all on his own? Is that what she wants us to believe?” The sharpest skeptics sang, “Makes you wonder about the other poor saps, doesn’t it?”

But within a few years few remembered Harrington or Sutton or, by 1970, even Mr. Reed. People knew she was a widow three times, and that was enough information about a woman as old as Olive. Those who’d never met her called her Widow Olive and her last name was forgotten, like something extinct. Gossip became myth and myth became fact: during Vietnam, wives and girlfriends with men over there went a mile out of their way to avoid passing the farmhouse on Fly Summit Road. “I know it’s superstitious and all,” they would say. “Even so.” The young women who said this wore their hair beneath blue-and-white bandannas; they shared corduroy maternity smocks and they couldn’t accurately name any of Olive’s husbands or the circumstances of their deaths, but, as they say, even so.

Olive minded none of this. She tended the farm chores and continued to rent the fields to Mr. Beckley’s son, and she spent several hours a day composing and singing. Because few spoke to Olive, her trips into the village were excursions of efficiency. Her voice, often unused until her nightly singing, acquired a dustiness by afternoon. Her kitchen garden thrived and her cutting bed was so extravagant in color and height that those driving down Fly Summit Road couldn’t help but stare at the bursting peonies in June, or the riot of the poor black-eyed Susans in August. Hers was an idyllic life: the whitewashed farmhouse, the neat red barn, the raked and staked gardens, her music at night. She was never lonely, never felt sorry for herself. She thought of Mr. Reed often, but never with regret. She planned to live to a hundred and then die in her bed, with the mouse still skittering in the wall. There was no reason to think she might not. There was no reason for Olive to fear.

One day when Olive was in her late seventies, she woke up and discovered she could not hear. She supposed what one might suppose in such a situation: earwax, an infection, a temporary loss. But the doctor, who wasn’t much older than a boy, informed her otherwise. He wrote on a piece of paper: “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do.”

The doctor’s name was Henry Cupper; he was part of a government program that returned army doctors to the countryside. Dr. Cupper wore bushy sideburns and a leather thong around his wrist and an open collar. There was a touching secrecy to him, as if he had been damaged at some point and had an unnatural reaction to suffering, which in fact was true. He was thirty-two and had served eighteen months in the army until he acquired a mysterious parasite after swimming in the Perfume River upstream from Hue. “Almost a year in the hospital in Honolulu,” he scribbled in a note to Olive. “My system was poisoned all the way through. Even today we don’t know what it was. Meanwhile, half my company was blown up in a coconut grove.” Dr. Cupper remained just young enough to still say, “I became a doctor to help others.”

He worked in Washington County nine months before he first treated Olive. In this time, among other duties, he delivered seven babies, set three broken arms, sewed two hundred stitches, cleared a dozen sets of blocked-up pipes, and attended the deaths of two elderly women whose hearts barely beat in their chests. Olive read of their deaths in the newspaper and tsked over the shame; later, when Dr. Cupper was treating her, he wrote in one of the many notes that the women had gone peacefully. “It was time.”

He fell into a routine of dropping by the farmhouse on Fly Summit Road every Monday. After examining Olive’s ears and finding no change, he would politely exchange notes with her for ten or fifteen minutes before moving on. “So many patients,” he wrote on Olive’s notepad. “None as patient as you.” His handwriting was sloppy and difficult to read at first, but as the weeks and then months passed, she grew accustomed to its precarious slant. Once she inquired if he hoped to have a family, and Dr. Cupper proved how honest a man he was by writing quickly, “I’m afraid I’m unable to.”

Once he wrote, “You must have been a beautiful girl.”

He rearranged his schedule so that he visited her at the end of his rounds. She would make tea as the evening descended upon the farmland and they would pass notes, sharing the stories of their pasts. Dr. Cupper was from Dresden, an hour to the north. Before shipping off to Hue he had married the most beautiful girl in the township. “She left me within a year,” he wrote. “There was a baby, but he didn’t live.” Olive recognized the pain around his eyes. It was all he revealed about the loss, but it was more than Olive would have expected: she wondered if each generation believed in the truth a little more than the previous. Probably not, but Dr. Cupper would make you think so. Dr. Cupper would make you believe in anything.

Sometimes she would play the piano for him. She hadn’t abandoned her music, but the joy had diminished. As time went by fewer melodies arose in her head. Then they stopped altogether. She didn’t dare sing for anyone, especially the doctor. In truth there was no one to sing for except Dr. Cupper. How quickly Olive had become an old old lady! Deaf and nearly mute, with tufts of flat, snowy hair around her face. Recently she had trouble sleeping, bothered by a new fear she’d never wake up. She was older than Harrington had been when he ate the ham. She was quickly becoming older than anyone she had ever known. Whenever Olive saw a little girl in the village, she would have to suppress the urge to cup her warm, milky cheeks and warn her against the onslaught of time. But the child wouldn’t believe her: What child would? The only people who believe in the reality of age are the very old; doesn’t everyone else believe she will be spared?

She asked this question of Dr. Cupper, and he agreed that he had yet to meet a patient who was prepared to die. “Sometimes I find myself in the position of having to help them.” It was the first time he had brought up death with her: the word scribbled on his notepad caused a lurch within.

After Cupper had been coming to see her for nearly half a year, she asked in a note, “How am I holding up, Doctor?

“Strong as a bull.”

“You’d tell me if there’s something wrong? If you start to see a decline?”