A Map of the World (57 page)

I had always liked December because it was the beginning of the quiet season. The crops were in, the house was full of food, we were ready for any siege, and we could rest. In the mornings before Howard went out for chores he’d start a fire in the stove, so that when I came down to get breakfast there was always the good warmth and smell of wood burning. Although I had had to go to work I often felt, just for a moment, that we were all shut in, in the glow of the generous hearth, in the house where there was color and music, the thick smell of our life that would go on and on despite the naked trees shivering, the bare, cold world outside. Then of course I had to chase to get dressed, to wake the girls, to stir the oatmeal, to pack lunches, to find mittens, to make a grocery list. But there was
often that moment, coming down the stairs, turning on the dim yellow light over the stove, loving our shelter.

When I got to Prairie Center I parked up the way by the old Kresler place and then walked along the road the quarter mile or so to the farm. I had wanted to come back since I’d been let out in September, but I hadn’t had a way to get there during the week, and I wouldn’t have had time anyway, with Emma gone for a short morning at school. I knew that Howard had driven over on the weekends a few times, to get lumber and furniture, but I had not had the nerve to ask him to take us. It was clear that he hadn’t wanted us to come.

He had mentioned that the Boy Scout people were going to take the house down. It didn’t look like much, and it would require more money to make sound than it was probably worth, and if it stood empty it would only invite vandals. I walked in through the woods by the road. The house had been a good place, but I had been trying to tell myself, day after day, that we would find another. The woods were a different matter. I used to come out on winter nights, when the sky was heavy with stars. The shadowy trees, dignified and knowledgeable, seemed as much a part of the heavens as of earth, and I’d get the feeling that it wouldn’t take much of anything to step into the blackness of the sky, that there wasn’t any magic to becoming a part of it.

On that December day I walked over the carpet of wet brown leaves, touching the gray trunks, one after the next. I could see the pond, dull and still, in the distance. I leaned against an enormous burr oak and it came to me then, not only in my intellect, but also in my limbs, my blood, my skin: Lizzy wasn’t here in Prairie Center anymore. It was a comfort to feel the tree’s cold, spiny bark through my sweater, to feel my own fingers in my mouth. The grief, I knew, wasn’t really ever going to go away. I leaned there for a long time, feeling the sharpness, the weight of the thing that was Lizzy’s absence. We would never understand what she had become. She probably wasn’t anything independent of us anymore, and in each of us she was evident in different ways: in Dan’s graying hair, his slow smile, in Theresa’s faraway look, her nervous laugh, perhaps in a deeper tenderness.

The pond had meant various things to all of the people who had lived
on our farm—and it would be the Boy Scouts’ best place—but for us it would always be more than just what it was, a shallow hole filled with water, a few cold, nearly dead fish on the bottom. The water was motionless. It looked, through the trees, as if it was a large eye that would have been grateful for a lid, for sleep.

The terrible thing, I wanted to tell Howard, the terrible thing is that there is so much good, and gradually it slips away from you. I had not believed until last summer that loss is determined, charted in us from the start, as inevitable and fixed as blood type and eye color. As I stood against the tree I remembered only days before, after the verdict was read, after I was acquitted. The jury had deliberated for two hours, while we waited in the courtroom. The words, “What say you?” and “We find the defendant not guilty” rang in my ears and the room began to reel around me. I didn’t cry. I must have stood up because I found myself in Rafferty’s plaid embrace. He had not spoken more than five words to me since my testimony. Howard was putting his arms around the two of us. The judge in his imposing desk, the jury members, the spectators, were slipping back and forth. I looked out over Rafferty’s shoulder and I saw, in one fixed place, Mrs. Mackessy. Susan Dirks was patting her hand and talking at her. She was pale and dead-still. Theresa stepped forward then, blocking her out as she grabbed Howard and hugged him, weeping into his neck. When she moved away, still keeping hold of his hand, Mrs. Mackessy had gone, vanished. Having an enemy is a strangely intimate affair, and I felt, even while I was hanging onto Rafferty, that already something was missing, the canker to which I’d grown accustomed.

Rafferty grasped my wrists and adjusted me to face him squarely. “I have to rush off,” he said. “We’ll talk in a few days. We should very seriously think about suing Mackessy for damages.”

“No,” I said.

“You feel that way now, but you let it settle. You think about it.”

“No.”

“We’ll talk,” he said, leaning over to kiss my cheek. “Good-bye, sweetheart.” He whispered, “You threw me for a goddamn loop but you pulled it off. It couldn’t have gone better; I couldn’t have designed it more perfectly myself. Dirks knew if she brought it up in the cross the jurors
would feel even sorrier for you. It probably made her blood pressure go off the charts to pass up the opportunity. Did you plan it? It was a coup, my dear, a coup.”

“No,” I said to his back.

That morning, walking in our woods, it seemed as if everything had been out of focus all year and gradually, very slowly, the lens was being turned, the picture coming clear. For Theresa, God was something that was outside of her, some unfathomable being who made the highway radiant. I thought in the harsh December wind that for me God was something within that allowed me, occasionally, to see. Theresa had forgiven us, forgiven me—she had done so not long after Lizzy’s death. I hadn’t known that a person could so willingly forgive, didn’t know what it meant, how it could be, what it was made of, the strange stuff called forgiveness. She had forgiven me nearly as soon as she thought to blame, so that her forgiveness was allied with what seemed a holy sort of understanding and love.

They had looked as if they belonged, Howard and Theresa, when they walked out of the courtroom together, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, as if they were the ones who lived together and were going home to their supper. And I thought how much easier it would be for Howard to love someone like Theresa, someone whose trouble is clear. My misfortunes were messy, hard to pin down, brought upon me by my own hand. In the woods it seemed to me that Theresa represented the world as a wholesome, good place, and that she must seem so for Howard too. I walked around the marsh, scaring up some ducks and a few geese that had not yet gone south. I would someday soon try to tell Howard more about it, all of it, I said to myself. I didn’t know who else I would live with if it wasn’t Howard, who else would understand the strangeness of our life. But I also knew that we might go along and along, that we might come to a point where we’d look back to find that the relationship had disappeared.

I had walked out into the old orchard, looking at the brown, hard, rotten apples still hanging on the trees. I remembered the night, after the funeral, when I’d run into Theresa and we had stood against the trees, talking. I was grateful for that accidental meeting. As much as it pained me to think of it, I loved that night, too. We hadn’t realized it at the time
but the conversation had been our chance to make an ending. It had been a suitable and good end.

I stood looking out across the fields, knowing, I thought, every stone, each clump of dirt, calling all of it ours. I wanted to take something, but I couldn’t think what it should be. In the end I looked, and closed my eyes, holding it, keeping it. I had driven home then, back to Spring Grove, and we had spent the afternoon in the kitchen, cooking our long overdue Thanksgiving dinner. Howard had thought of it, had thought to haul the turkey out of the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. I made one of Nellie’s famous Jell-O salads, and pumpkin pie with the last of Howard’s wheat flour. He peeled potatoes and, with Nellie’s blow-by-blow instructions over the phone, pulled together her sacred stuffing. Shortly before the food was ready the girls became insufferable. We fed them hot dogs and put them to bed. We came back downstairs, and by the light of two candles we sat before our feast.

We ate in silence for a while. We both knew we weren’t going to be able to talk about the farm for a time; we couldn’t talk about the future because we had no idea what or where it was. The present itself had for so long been uncertain, and we weren’t ready to rehash the details and the chance that had brought us back to solid ground. We tried to find our way. I told him a few more bits and pieces about Dyshett and Sherry and Debbie, and he told me about the dream life of the Indians who lived a billion years ago in Wisconsin. After the meal we put the turkey and Jell-O and stuffing into the refrigerator, and blew out the candles, leaving the entire mess of the afternoon and evening in darkness. There were no lights on in the house anywhere and we fumbled up the stairs to bed.

I had gotten down under the covers and was waiting for him to wind his clock and slide in next to me. He sat, his elbows on his thighs, his head in his hands.

“What is it?” I asked. “Is it the farm?”

He shook his head. “That’s not what’s bothering me. I don’t know, Alice. I don’t know.”

Although I couldn’t have said what it was he needed to tell me, I had the sense of its color, its shape; it was like a small black haze hanging over him. It was something that he would say that would change us, again. I thought of what he had come through, losing what he loved most, and I
thought too of the separate journey I’d taken, the anger I’d felt at him in jail for the hundreds of little betrayals, and then how I’d come to have faith that at some point those feelings would be washed clean. For him, perhaps nothing had come clean. He lay down with his back to me. I could feel him shaking. I cried some, too, then, holding him in my arms, kissing his hair, feeling what for Theresa came easily, and what for me had always been difficult. All the same I knew I was forgiving him. I had that miraculous clarity for an instant and so I understood that the forgiveness itself was strong, durable, like strands of a web, weaving around us, holding us.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jane Hamilton lives, works, and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Wisconsin. Her short stories have appeared in
Harpers
magazine, and her first book,
The Book of Ruth
, was awarded the 1989 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for best first novel.