For some reason Thomas seemed suddenly to slip into a morose frame of mind and grew uncharacteristically quiet. Perhaps it was due to the lingering memory of the dingy stalls and shoddy merchandise of the flea market combined with his suspicions concerning the bargain price of the bag of peanuts, or perhaps it was the onset of the winter rain outdoors contrasting with the false brightness of the ice cream shop, which, except for the two of us and a frowzy gray-haired woman behind the counter, was deserted. Perhaps it was the tardy realization that this was an inappropriate time of year to be eating a cold dessert and that three dollars and fifty cents was an excessive amount to pay for so little.
Or perhaps it was the music that began playing over the speakers soon after we were seated: a recording of the Andrews Sisters. The woman behind the counter was mouthing the words along with the recording, I noticed, and while we ate she sat slouched upon a stool casting surly glances in our direction, as if wishing that we would leave so that she could have the place to herself once again. Perhaps she wanted to sing aloud and bring back the days of the forties and fifties when life had been full of promise. Indeed, it seemed to be the music that played upon Thomas's mood, for I saw his jaw tighten as he scanned the ceiling for the audio speakers.
“You know, Rosie,” Thomas said as if trying to dredge up a small measure of cheer, “I keep thinkin' about them crazy stories and all the people that believe they're true.” He was speaking quite loudly, his voice pitched higher than usual. “People'll believe anything, won't they? The world's full of suckers!” He shook his head, then smiled halfheartedly and sighed, as if finding the subject depleted and himself too exhausted to speak in competition with the music.
He took several large bites of his banana split in swift succession. A new song was playing now, one that my mother had sung to me a number of times: “I'll Be Seeing You in Apple Blossom Time.” After it ended, the sisters launched into a livelier song: “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.” Thomas glared up at the corner where one of the speakers was mounted and swallowed as if with great difficulty.
“Let's go,” Thomas said abruptly. He slid across the seat of the booth and stood up. His plastic ice cream dish was nearly empty, but I had taken only a few token bites from around the perimeter of my single scoop. I followed his lead, however, and we left together, dropping our dishes into the trash bin beside the door and hurrying through the rain to the car.
Thomas started the car but did not put it into gear. He inhaled deeply and closed his eyes. Then he opened them and shook his head as if to clear his thoughts.
“Are you ill?” I asked. “Or do you dislike the music of the Andrews Sisters for some particular reason?”
I had guessed correctly. He turned to look at me for a long moment and then offered a faint, sickly smile. “I guess I can't hide things very well, can I?” Instead of putting the car into motion, he reached forward and turned off the ignition. The rain splattered against the windshield. I followed the path of a single droplet as it slid downward, gathering into itself other droplets.
“Who was the fool who said music could soothe the savage beast?” Thomas asked quietly.
And though I do not think he expected an answer, I said, “I believe it was an English playwright after the time of Shakespeare, and the phrase is âsavage
breast
,' not beast.”
“Couldn't prove it by me,” he said, then added, “But whoever it was, he didn't tell the whole story, 'cause music can sure rile up a body, too.” He mindlessly ran a finger around the steering wheel for a few moments, and presently he stopped, then looked at me and asked, “Do you ever wish you could wipe things out of your mind, Rosie?”
I did not reply, for I was certain he knew the answer I would give. Had he not recently delivered to me a lecture about the virtues of one's putting the past behind him?
“I mean, it's kinda like those crazy stories we were talkin' about,” he said. “You start out with somethin' that happened to you one time, and you run it back and forth in your mind over and over, tear it apart and put it back together, add a little bit to it here and take away a little bit there until it might end up a different story from the way it really was.” He stopped and sighed. “Then again, it might stay the same, and sometimes that's worse. But whichever way it goes, you let it haunt you and torment you, and you just can't get past it.”
I sat very still, my lips pressed in a firm line. Whereas Thomas had begun by speaking about himself, his words now seemed to be aimed at me. Or could it be that he, too, carried within his soul some secret torment?
When he spoke again, it was a half whisper. “I killed a man once, Rosie.”
I shot him a look of surprise at the sudden divulging of this news, though it came to me almost at once that since he had served in the armed forces during World War II, the incident must have occurred then. My words came quickly, almost impatiently. “Many men have done the same in wartime,” I said.
“It didn't happen in the war,” he said. “I ran over a man with a tractor, and he died.”
I sought his eyes and saw that his words were true. “It was an accident,” I ventured.
“Yes,” he said.
“Then you are not to blame,” I said, though I knew that my words were empty.
“I was daydreamin',” he said. “It was my carelessness that killed him.”
“It was not intentional,” I said, regretting my words at once, for I understood that this fact, rather than assuaging one's feelings of guilt, could only exacerbate them. Over the course of time, I suppose, one could pardon himself for bringing about another's death in self-defense, as a duty of war, or for the sake of honor, but to snuff out a life because of momentary inattention or youthful negligence would be personally and permanently irremissible.
Questions flooded my mind: When had this happened? Who was the man who had been killed? How could Thomas have failed to see him in time? Why had the man not simply moved out of the way? How fast could a tractor move? Had death come instantaneously? Had Thomas been charged with manslaughter? I knew that he would tell me anything that I asked, but I found that I could not bear to ply him with my questions, to probe into the particulars.
I cannot even guess how long we looked at each other, scarcely breathing. The rain increased, drumming upon the roof of the car for a furious minute and then subsiding all at once into a steady drizzle again.
Thomas at last broke the spell. “The man was dirt poor,” he said. “Little old farm that never put out anything, had maybe a dozen scrawny chickens, a bony horse or two. Wife had died. Didn't have a family, just a little bean pole of a girl twelve years old, nobody else. We took the girl in to live with us, and when I came back from fightin' in the war I was expected to marry her and provide for her.”
“Her name was Rita,” I said.
“Yep, it was,” he said. “She was sixteen when we married, and I was twenty-two.” The rain had abated more, as if someone were shutting it off slowly by means of a faucet. It was cold in the car. Thomas must have seen me shiver, for he turned on the ignition, adjusted the heater, and pulled out of the parking lot slowly.
I felt the tension within me both heightened and alleviated by the interruption, for though I longed for Thomas to continue talking, I also wanted to cover my ears. My husband's past, of which I knew so little, had a sudden and powerful hold over me. I wanted to learn it in one sitting. At the same time, it frightened me to face the specter of his first wife, for I shrank from the comparison with a sixteen-year-old bride.
“She hated me,” he said presently as we passed through the outskirts of Derby. I felt a collision within me. “I think she'd always hated me for what I did to her pa,” he said, “but she was the real quiet type and wouldn't talk hardly at all. You couldn't ever tell what was goin' on inside of her. My folks said I owed it to her to give her a home and make it up to her for losin' her daddy, and so my daddy told her the plan, and she told him to tell me she'd marry me.” We were on Highway 11 now, headed back toward Filbert. “I remember the night before the weddin' wishin' I could run away,” Thomas said.
The rain had stopped completely, and the sky was clearing. I gazed up into the night and was astonished to see how quickly the clouds had parted, how brightly the stars behind them were glittering. I saw Orion spread-eagled against the blackness.
I thought suddenly of the words in
Kon-Tiki
, which my mother and I had read when I was a child of ten. Thor Heyerdahl described the nighttime view of life on a raft in the Pacific Ocean thus: “The world was simpleâstars in the darkness.” As it had come to Mr. Heyerdahl that life, when distilled to its essentials, was the same for man in
A.D.
1947 as it was in 1947
B.C.
, so it came to me that night that my life was only one of countless stories of human pain; that though I had considered myself the prima donna of sufferers, I was simply one of a vast troupe; that darkness indeed descends upon every man and woman, but that moon and stars also shine down upon all.
“After we was married, she opened up and started talkin',” Thomas was saying now. “Oh, did she ever. She talked plenty. Nobody would've believed me if I'd have told 'em the things she said. Some days I couldn't believe my ears. She hated me, like I said, but she was real jealous at the same time. Always accused me of havin' girlfriends behind her back. Would slap me one minute and throw herself all over me the next.”
I could not form a picture of these things; indeed, I did not want to! Thomas was talking faster now, spitting his words out as if they were sour fruit. “Nagged at me to move away from my kin in North Carolina. She said things'd be better and we'd be happier. So we did. We packed up and moved down here, only it didn't get betterâjust worse. When she wasn't complainin', she was listenin' to her phonograph records. The Andrews Sistersâit was always them. Used to make me sick at my stomach hearin' their perky singin' when I was livin' in hell.”
Thomas had reached a speed of sixty miles per hour by this time but suddenly glanced at the speedometer and decelerated. “When our baby died,” he said after a heavy pause, “she said it was my fault. Said the baby was puny 'cause I kept her all tore up inside the whole time she was carryin' it.”
Thomas did not speak again until we pulled into our driveway. “I lived with that woman over twenty years,” he said. “When she took sick and died, it was like I'd been let out of jail.” He looked straight ahead as he spoke. “I told my family not to ever say her name in front of me again.”
I felt as if my sense of order had been upended, as if every fenced city within my kingdom had been battered and despoiled, as if I had been swept away in a mighty whirlwind. Yet for all the violence within me, I sensed that there was to be a propitious end, that thrust forth from my confining province, my view of the landscape was to be much improved.
Though the question was inappropriate for the time, I could not stop myself from posing it. “Why did you marry me?” I asked.
Thomas took the key from the ignition and, still without looking at me, said, “Oh, somehow I knew you'd beâ¦safe andâ¦well,
steady
, Rosie. I could tell you were a good woman. I'd had a bad one, and I wanted a good one. I wanted to forget.” He sucked in his breath and added, “I guess we spend our life tryin' to forget things, don't we?”
I mean to cover much ground in the chapter at hand. Unlike the last five chapters, which belabored the passing of only two days in December, this chapter will traverse swiftly over time. By the end of it, I plan to have progressed through the end of February. As the summer days are waning, so my stamina is flagging. August is rapidly advancing upon me, and I must complete my tale.
Though I have no doubt that I could write at least one chapter for every day of my friendship with Birdie from December forward, I have calculated that to do so, an additional one hundred chapters would be required; thus a single volume could not contain the whole. Too, I am postponing a number of weighty actions until the close of my story, and while I feel a foreshock of terror at the thought of what I must do, I nevertheless find my heart straining toward the finish.
I was fifty years old, then, when I crept forth from my hiding place, my eyes blinking in the strong light. It is a strange phenomenon of life that one can see a thing many times but never observe it, that he can hear yet not attend, that he may be fully sentient yet lacking in perception, understanding, and feeling.
I had known on a rational level, of course, of suffering in the lives of others, but I had never allowed the knowledge to penetrate my heart. For many years I had seen the children of Emma Weldy Elementary School file through the lunchroom. Upon many occasions I had looked into hollow eyes bespeaking lost innocence and betrayed trust and had taken note of ragged clothing and ill grooming, yet I had never allowed myself to be touched by these outward signs of inner wounds. I had read extensively. My books, magazines, and newspapers spared no details in the reporting of injuries both physical and emotional. When one is in bondage to his own brand of hurt, however, that of others is easily forgotten, if dwelt upon at all. It is discounted as second-rate.
Within twenty-four hours, on December 17 and 18, I had been unexpectedly made aware of personal suffering in the lives of both Birdie and Thomas, the two people who had demonstrated toward me what I knew to be a genuine constancy of love. For once I made no attempt to measure their suffering by the yardstick of my own past. Because I cared for themâmore deeply, I knew, than I could bring myself to confessâthe knowledge of their past suffering carved a tunnel through my wall of pride and pain. And not merely a tunnel; no, it was as if a stick of dynamite had cleared out a wide cave within me, had opened up outlets for sunlight and air.