John's Wife: A Novel (69 page)

By coincidence, on the day of Trevor’s funeral, Floyd called home. He wouldn’t say where he was. On the road somewhere down South. He had another truck which he’d got from a guy who suddenly didn’t want it anymore. And now a hitchhiker he’d picked up had just offered him a job running drugs up from the border with it. “You gonna do that?” “Heck, no. The sonuvabitch’ll pay dear for even askin’.” “Don’t do nothin’ wrong, Floyd.” “No. Where was you all day? I rung up earlier.” “To a funeral. You recall that feller we bought our house insurance from? He died.” Edna pressed her skirt down across her knees. “When you comin’ back, Floyd?” “Not for a time, I reckon. Who’s John got in the store?” “It’s shut down. I hear tell it’s gonna be a museum.” “Always was one. Did he find him some sucker yet to run his truckin’ racket?” “Looks like it. Some feller from outa town who useta live here oncet. His wife seems nice, she was at the funeral today. They say she used to be on TV. Anyways that’s what they wrote in the newspaper.” “What did they write about me in the newspaper?” “Nary a word. Was you expectin’ to be famous?” “You know what I mean. What did they say when Stu got killt? Who’d they say done it?” “They never did.” “It wasn’t me, Edna. I swear on the Bible. I never touched old Stu.” “Who said you did?” “There’s some thinkin’ it.” She really didn’t want to talk about all this. It was making her cry again. It was awful all the questions she had to answer when he left, all the things they told her. “Are you keepin’ warm, Floyd?” “Here where I am, keepin’ warm ain’t a problem. What’s a problem is I don’t have no money to send you. Not yet.” “It’s okay. I’m gonna have a job soon at the new pioneer museum.” “It ain’t okay. But nothin’ I can do. If I get some, though, I’ll drop it off with your half sister like always.” “I reckon she’ll be about as happy about that as she ever was.” “Just so she don’t turn me in. Did you talk to the bank about the mortgage?” “Yes.” Charity ticked Floyd off so, she figured it best not to tell him the rest. “It’s okay for now.” “How’s it okay?” “Just okay. Oh, a funny thing, Floyd. John’s wife come by not long after you went off. She brung me that little rug. You remember? She said she heard they’d been some mix-up and she was sorry and wanted me to have it.” “That damn rug!” “I told her I didn’t want it, thank you. I wouldn’t let her leave it. Finally, I just shut the door on her.” “You done right! Who does she think she is, anyhow? Uh-oh. Listen, I gotta go now, Edna.” Edna felt a sudden chill. It was like a cold wind had got inside her. What it was was a thought, plain and simple: Floyd wasn’t coming back. Not ever. It was like he’d died. All she’d have would be this voice. Maybe. “I’ll call again soon as I can. I miss you, Edna. You take care now, you hear?” “You, too,” she said back, her voice trembling, but by then the line was dead.

The forest had vanished. It was as though a door had closed. She searched for it but the landscape had changed. Wherever she walked, it was ever more desolate, as though it were dying from within. Like a failure of the imagination, she thought, having been taught to think this way. Her friend and teacher, too: gone, as if he’d never existed. She’d only meant to lead him out of the forest before it destroyed him, just as she’d said in the note she left behind, but as usual, he must have misread it, and now all she had left was his voice in her head, his fancy declarations about art and nature and truth and beauty and all that, his barked commands and the cruel criticisms that made her cry, his stormy impatience with failure, the groans that wracked him as he ripped up his drawings of her when he despaired of ever approximating his unattainable ideal. She loved him, perhaps simply because she had no other to love, but she learned not to say so for it made him distant and moody and caused his drawings to smudge and the paint to run on the canvas. To love and be loved was not what she was given to do. She might rather not do what she did, be what she was, but there seemed little choice, it was as though it were somehow her destiny and her due to pose forever, kneeling on a rock at the edge of a flowing river, that he might enact his noble pursuit and its attendant tragedy. But where now was that river? Where was that rock? And where the forest that framed them? Could she find it and resume her place, it might restore him to his and to his famous ordeal, but as she roamed the world in search of it, a forest seemed less and less likely. That which had created and sustained the forest had vanished with the forest’s vanishing. Now a cold wind blew, from which no cover. In the old days, he’d sometimes read to her, holding her hand, and she often dreamt now in her bleak wanderings of a fairytale rescue like those in the stories she’d heard then and heard now in his voice only, but her waking life knew no such dreams, for all those stories, she knew, had died when the forest died. A fire? She seemed to remember one, but perhaps it was not so dramatic as that. More like rot at the roots maybe. A withering away, a withdrawal, a subsidence, much as a fading memory sinks away and is gradually lost to recall, so too this forest so lost to sight one doubted that it ever was. But though astray and abandoned, she persisted in her search in spite of all that had happened, tracing and retracing her steps, for she was sure of it: there
was
a forest and she was there and a man was there. Once.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Portions of
John’s Wife
first appeared in
Conjunctions
. The author is grateful to Miriam and Toby Olson for the use of their Cape Cod home during a crucial stage of the writing of this book. Thanks, also, to Brown University and Deutscher Academtscher Austauschdtenst.

Copyright © 1996 by Robert Coover

ISBN: 978-1-4532-9673-8

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