The End of Always: A Novel (20 page)

He loved me but he hit me. He touched me as if driven by something he could not control. Then he said I was not pretty. He bought me flowers and criticized my clothes. I knew my clothes were shabby. He did not need to point this out to me. I thought that everyone could see how bad they were whenever I left the house. If I caught a glimpse of myself in a store window, I saw a thin girl with clothes that hung on her like sacks.

I swallowed hard. My hunger knew no end and August gave me very little and the more often he hit me, the more afraid I became to ask for what I should have been rightly given. There was no way to ease the hollow or allay the ache and now nausea rose unbidden. I believed that hunger would make you sick and it seemed I was sick every morning, as if my body had chosen to feel queasy rather than empty. And now there was only one thing left to do.

I walked quickly. Two blocks over, a band of boys in short pants and white shirts played stickball on an open lot. Two small girls, no older than eight or nine and dressed in lemon-yellow dresses and red leather boots, pushed past me, followed by their mother, who wore a gray skirt and a gray blouse and a straw boater trimmed with gray silk ribbon. She dropped her gaze as she passed me. I said good morning but she did not reply.

Street traffic picked up. I heard the clattering of the interu
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n and its distant bell and saw its glassy cars and flickering blue sparks. Another wave of nausea moved through me and washed away and then swelled again. After that I was in the center of town. I turned up the road to my father’s house. I passed the springhouse and watched the summer women in their white clothes rest on iron benches while they waited for the cure. No water in the world could heal them of what ailed them, if they lived in the same world I did. Four young men on bicycles wobbled along the gravel path and then sped away down the street. I had known this neighborhood as long as I had been alive but now it was unfamiliar, the way that something well known appears in a dream and no longer looks as it did when you knew it in real life.

I stood at the back steps and licked my lips. Then I climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. When no one came I knocked again. This time Martha appeared, frail in her white shirtwaist. When she saw me she fell back. Then she opened the door. She put her arms around me and whispered my name. She was no more substantial than a bony cage.

We sat on the open ground in the middle of the trees between my father’s house and our neighbor’s place. Insects hummed in the long grass. I told her I was married. I told her about the ceremony at the courthouse and the house that August had arranged for us, its three rooms and the curtains I had sewn using a stick and a spool of thread. I told her about Bertha, who did not have to do anything except play with her flowers and her dishes and her fan. I told her about the dinner at the restaurant and about the roses August had pinned to my dress. I showed her my gold band.

Martha pulled a length of rattling hollow reed from the ground and split it in half with her thumbnail while I talked. She broke the halved pieces into smaller pieces and let the pieces fall onto the grass.

“What,” I said. “What?”

“Are you all right?” She lifted my hand and then let it fall back onto the grass. She stroked my fingers. “You look thin.”

I shrugged. “You are one to talk,” I said, but she looked stricken. “I am all right,” I said. I batted flies from my hair and slapped a mosquito on my forearm.

“It is so hot,” she said. She dabbed at her face with the back of her hand. “Let’s go under the trees.”

We found a place at the base of an old maple where roots heaved up out of the ground and the dirt was cool. I lay down and Martha sat cross-legged beside me. After a short time she straightened her legs and rolled onto one hip and leaned on one elbow. She told me that Hattie had been sent out to work at a neighbor’s house, to help with the children. “They have a new baby and two others under three. It will be just for the summer,” she said. “In the fall she will go back to school.”

“Are you sure?”

“Are you working?” she asked. Then she shook her head. “No,” she said. “Of course not. You could not be here if you were.” Dappled light fell around her. She frowned. “William Oliver came to the house. He was looking for you.”

“August told me to quit,” I said.

“It was about something else,” she said. “He stood on the front steps and recited something. I think it was poetry but I did not know the poem. Or maybe it came from the Bible.”

“The Bible,” I said. “I am surprised you recognized it.”

I thought of my mother’s Bible, printed in Old High German, where someone had recorded the dates and places of our births next to our names and which she kept on a table in the living room and from which she sometimes read aloud, translating the stories as she went, but whose words seemed like nothing to me but distant things that had nothing to do with me.

Martha sat up. “The Bible has always seemed to be a great deal beside the point,” she said. “As it has been for you. As it has been for all of us. Suffer the little lambs and all of that.” She snorted and picked at the grass. I had no idea Martha felt this way and I looked at her with interest. But she just pulled grass out of the ground and threw it into the yard. Finally she said, “He did not believe me when I said you were gone. He kept asking where you were. He stood on our steps like a man possessed. He was driving the laundry cart and it ended up blocking the street. No one could get by. I told him over and over again that you were not here. Finally he left.”

“He is full of ideas,” I said. “None of them good.”

“Could you have married him?”

The grass was scratchy and I kept feeling insects crawl up my legs. Her question was irritating and beside the point. I sighed. “I do not know, Martha. Maybe.”

“Maybe?” She touched the back of my hand. “Did he make an offer?”

An ant marched along a long blade of grass under the tree and came to the end and turned and marched back along the grass in just the way that it had come. I wondered how I might describe William Oliver’s offer. It hardly seemed real anymore but of course it had been very real when it came to me.

“He had another arrangement in mind,” I said at last.

“I just thought. If you had another prospect.” She fingered the buttons on her blouse.

“It does not matter,” I said. “I would not have married him.”

“You preferred August Bethke,” she said. She made his name sound like a curse or a disease.

“Yes,” I said. But now when I thought of August, I thought not only of the way he made me shudder with pleasure in the dark. I also thought of the gun he kept hidden in a bucket under the washstand, which I had found one day, and which he had explained away by saying he needed a gun for protection, although he would not tell me just what it was he needed to protect himself from. And then I thought of the knife he wore strapped to his waist. Of the low sling of his tool belt with its hammers and sharp screwdrivers and something like the talons of a bird rolled into a ball that he could use to pry out nails. Then I thought again of the touch of his hand, the smell of his hair, the taste of him, the sounds he made when he was with me, all of it a confusing world of things that did not add up as I had expected.

Martha lay back down on her hip and picked up a small stick. She ran the point of the stick through the dirt. “Do you like being married?” she asked in a prim voice.

“Yes.” But I could not help myself. I looked away and would not meet her gaze.

“All of it?”

“Yes.” But I would not tell her about the part I did not like and we would never ever talk about the part I did.

“Everything?” she said. Now she would not look at me.

“You will like it, too,” I said. “You will see. When you marry George.”

Martha flushed. “I do not want to talk about George,” she said. “Not that way.”

“Why not?” I said. I could hear the callous tone in my voice. “He is just like all the rest.”

She stiffened. “How would you know?”

“Oh, I know,” I said, my words suddenly something I wore like a lead vest that would sink me once and for all. I sagged deeper into the grass. I felt old and experienced. I thought I would drown in the things I had begun to realize were true.

Flies hummed under the leaves. The grass smelled sweet and dry and spread away from us in a plaited yellow slope.

“Why did you come?” Martha said abruptly.

“Perhaps I missed you.”

“You did not miss me.”

“I did.” I glanced back at the house and felt a surge of sadness break over me and the world became airless then. “And I missed Hattie,” I said gently. “I wish she was here.”

“You did not miss us,” Martha said flatly. “You need something.”

I pressed my lips together and did not say anything. I thought of all the things I needed and the wishes that had gone unanswered and the sharpness of those thoughts ran through me like a knife. I could not understand why it was so wrong to need my family to care for me.

“I miss you,” I said. “I think about you every day.”

Martha sat up. “For once in your life, tell the truth,” she said. “You think I am stupid but I already know why you are here.” She waved her hand at my father’s house. “What else would bring you back?”

I rolled onto my stomach and put my head on my arms. In a buried and strained voice I told her that I needed some money for food. She did not have to give me much. Just something from the money I had earned at the laundry. Something I could hide in a shoe or under a floorboard and keep for myself. Something that would let me eat. August was so busy, I said. August worked so hard. He did not mean to but sometimes he forgot. That was understandable. He had so much to do. It was like this for lots of new wives. Of that I was sure.

She did not say anything until I was finished. Then she stood up. She waved her hands around her head to dispel a swarm of gnats. She turned to look back across the clearing, where the yellow siding of my father’s house made a broken shape behind the trees. “Come back to the house,” she said. “I will give you what I have.”

In the end, I bought a very small piece of cheese and a piece of a dry sausage and three apples and three potatoes and two cans of peas and a loaf of bread. It took me a long time to decide but I knew I had to pick things that would last. I sat on a bench in front of a cigar store and slowly ate the cheese and half of the sausage and a heel of the bread. I looked in the bag as I ate and counted my things and then tied the bag with its ropey cord.

It rained late in the afternoon and the lights flickered and went out. I stood in the dim kitchen. August had the matches. The wind came up and the trees tossed and the rain seethed along the side of the house and pelted the windows. I listened to the thunder break and roll. I flinched when lightning flashed. I lay down on the bed in my clothes and looked at the ceiling and thought about the rain slashing through Bertha’s flowers and about Martha as she pulled the money from my mother’s old leather purse and about Edwin, whom I had not seen since the day he held his head in his hands and howled but who was with me every day like the faint image of something warmly pleasant.

I hid my food below a loose floorboard in the bedroom. This I had pried up with the flat edge of a knife. I found a nail where I could hang the canvas bag by its cord so that it was held below the house in a cool shadow. Then I dropped the board back into place. I thought about the food as if it buttressed me against something I could not name. It made me feel better to think that I had carried my own supplies into the country where I now lived and was not so much at the mercy of those who controlled everything, even where I put my feet. Even the air I breathed.

The front windows were pearled with rain and the street was dark and watery. The lamplighter did not come this far out from the center of town so our road went dark at dusk and the only light came from the windows of houses. I stood and went to the window and leaned my forehead against the glass. I watched Bertha’s husband drop his suspenders so they hung in loops at his waist. He stretched and sat in his chair and unfolded his paper over his lap. I could smell whatever it was Bertha was cooking for dinner.

Three nights later, August came home from work. He smiled at me as he came through the door and then he kissed me. I watched him walk into the bedroom, where he dropped his tool belt on the floor. He took the knife out of his waistband and set it on the bedside table. He looked back at me and smiled again and looked at the bed as if I could read his mind. I watched him take two steps toward the basin. I heard the second step squeak. I saw him stop and look down at the floor. I saw him test the floorboard with his toe. He must have felt the board give because he squatted down and touched the edge of the board with his fingertips. He reached behind him for his tool belt and pulled out a screwdriver. He used the point of the screwdriver to pry the board up from the floor. He laid the board beside him. He looked into the darkness under the house. Then he reached down and felt around and pulled my canvas bag out from the shadows. He looked back at me, frowning. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, he’d turned the bag upside down and the contents had rolled out on the wooden floor. Two apples. Three potatoes. The cans of peas and most of the loaf of bread.

“What is this?” he said.

“August,” I said.

“What is this?” he said again, louder. He tossed the sack onto the bed.

I lowered my head. “Just some food,” I said.

“Just some food,” he repeated. He picked up one of the potatoes and tossed it from hand to hand. “You keep this for what reason?”

“To eat.”

“What?”

“To eat,” I said. “August.”

“To eat,” he said.

I nodded. “Yes,” I said.

“And this is what you buy with my money? Food you keep from me?” He let the potato drop to the floor.

“No,” I said. I watched the potato roll under the bed. It seemed unbearable that he would touch what was mine.

“No?” He kicked the apples and I winced. “You have some other money I do not know about?”