The Truest Pleasure (37 page)

I set in the chair so mad I felt dizzy. The anger roared inside my head like nausea and laughing gas combined. Tom, I thought, what a sneaking thing, to desert me. After coming here and courting me and making me fall in love and then taking over the place so my life was changed around and I have these children to raise. What a blackguard thing, to go and leave me. To make me depend on you, to take my youth, and then to go and leave me.

In my fury I thought how strong I was when single. I was prepared to live my life with reading and sewing and going to services and taking care of Pa. I had a balance then, and a delight in little things, a view of the world that was all destroyed by falling in love with Tom. Yes, I had a way of seeing then clearer than any I had had since. Recalling the simplicity
of my years before meeting Tom brought tears to my eyes.

There come to me a flood of things I disliked about Tom. I hated the way he never had the enthusiasm to go hunting and trapping the way most men in the family did. I hated the way he would nod when I read to him, like he was listening even when his mind was on the firewood he would sell in the village or the terraces he was going to make in the orchard to level the steep ground into shelves.

It made me shiver with anger to think of the way he left his shoes by the hearth. As Pa and me set by the fire I had to smell them. I hated the way he hung his pants on the bedpost and you could smell sweat on them and the scent of work. It embarrassed and revolted me to think how he would set with company, silent and dumb as a rock unless somebody asked him a question. He never had an opinion about anything. He never entertained people with a story or kept up his end of a conversation.

This is what made me maddest of all, to know that I was sounding like Lily. It made me angry at myself to think of the way Tom folded the cloth he had put over seedbeds. He wrapped the cloth in tight squares as though in a military ceremony. He placed his tools in the shed on the right nail or hook, like he thought he could own the earth just by keeping it in order. When he didn't have anything else to fix he would cut weeds along the fences and take old harness apart to save rings and brads and rivets. He nailed boxes to the wall of the shed where he sorted screws and nails and steeples. He would sift through a box of trash to save pins and pieces of string. I often wondered what he thought he was saving such things
for. Did he think he was going to live forever and could accumulate the wealth of the earth?

There was tears streaming down my cheeks and dripping on my wrists and hands. I had set there crying while anger thundered and roared in my head. The storm kept coming, but I tried to brush it away. What good was it? All the rage I could imagine wouldn't undo a single thing we had done.

I looked at Tom laying there and it seemed that as long as nobody else knowed he would not be dead. If Pa come in and saw him it would be over, or if one of the younguns woke and come to the bedroom I would have to tell them their daddy was gone. But as long as it was only me that knowed, it wasn't real, wasn't final. I set in the chair and thought it must have been three in the morning. And then I heard the mantel clock strike four. Time was moving on so fast I felt it flowing through me. I could almost hear the swishing and lapping of the waves rushing by and above me. I thought if I set silent and kept still long enough I might slow the river down, maybe even stop it. But the current swept through me and the room begun to cool off.

This is already my widowhood, I thought. I set there studying Tom's face getting white and lips turning blue. And it felt like somebody else looking at him through me. I shivered with the icy feeling of being hollow and clear enough for somebody to see through. It was like they was behind, seeing through my eyes what I saw. They was just inside, where the sense of myself was, there beside the me in myself.

Is it the Holy Spirit? I thought. Is it the guardian angel watching over Tom? Is it the other people who have died in this room? I shuddered and blinked.

Suddenly I saw all the things I had hated about Tom I could just as well have loved. Maybe that was me seeing through other eyes. Maybe Locke was right about me refusing to accept Tom's gifts. I saw what fools we had both been. All our quarreling had been such a waste. “The tabernacle is with men; former things are passed away,” I quoted. But it would have been impossible for Tom to have changed. I thought of his shoes by the hearth and fresh tears come to my eyes. The saddest thing of all was I saw that people couldn't be any way but what they are. Even when doing right they are apt to be doing something else wrong.

The pile of chestnut logs Tom had sawed and left to season for crossties set between the barn and orchard. That was the place where he split rails and it was covered with chips and splinters. Now there was nobody to hew the crossties, unless it was Joe, and Joe would be too busy walking his trapline and hewing his own crossties. I could do most any man's work, but I would never be able to lift those heavy logs and hew them into crossties.

And then I thought of the road up the ridge to the mountaintop orchard. Tom had kept the haul road mowed, and the weeds and brush cut back around the orchard itself. Places that had been all growed up when I married Tom had been opened and took care of while I hardly noticed. Once he started doing it Pa and me took for granted that weeds along the pasture edge would be trimmed, and weeds around the smokehouse and springhouse and along the trail to the branch would be cut so you could see a snake before stepping on it. Tom even mowed the path to the Sunset Rock two or three times a year.
Often after finishing up in the field, or returning from selling produce in the village, he took his scythe from the shed and whetted it bright in the late sun. Working in a steady rhythm he would lay flat weeds between the apple and pear trees, and big pokeweeds below the hogpen. He did it so regular I hardly noticed. When weeds was cut in the sun they sent up an aroma of oils and incense rank as ether. I would walk where he had mowed and smell the wilting fragrance and not even think of the work he had done to keep the ground clear. I had never been able to mow with the scythe. It was too heavy to swing, and too awkward to balance the long handle and blade with the weight in my shoulders. It would be years before Moody or Muir could mow either. The place would grow up the way it had before I married.

The same might be true of the new ground Tom had cleared by the river. Without him to do the plowing and hoeing we could not cultivate so many acres. His long hours and steady work was the equal of three or four hired hands. But it wasn't just the work he had done we couldn't replace. It was his planning and thinking about what might be done. Wherever he looked he saw possibility. Every piece of ground was an opportunity, as every hour and day was. It was his “idea” about what to do that I would find the hardest to replace.

I thought of the gates Tom had built and the road he had widened. The road would have to be worked every year to keep it in the fine shape he had left it. The ditches would have to be opened and the puddles filled. New gravel would have to be spread in the low places. The steps down to the spring would have to be kept clear of leaves or they would be buried in a year or two.

There was the strawberry bed up by the spring, where Joe's Poplar stood. Tom had kept the vines separated and the red dirt bare of weeds. It was the kind of job you had to do on your knees, and it took days. But Tom did it once in the spring when the berries bloomed and once in August. Every shoot and sprout had to be sorted and cut back and every tore root reburied.

We had never rented any of the Peace land. Since my great-great-grandpa had cleared the place it had been worked by the family. A lot of sweat had went into the dark loam by the river where Tom put his watermelon vines and tomatoes. I reckon some of that ground had been cleared by Indians for their little patches. But most had been maple swamps that had to be cut and drained. When the bottomland was wild it was covered with poison oak and poison ivy, and weeds that caused milksick when the cows eat them. Where Tom laid off his long straight rows had once been vines and sinkholes and snake dens. Tom laid off the straightest rows I had ever seen. A furrow he made run like a rifleshot to the yon end. I never understood how he could make a horse stumble over the clods and dips in such a straight line.

To farm all the acres Tom had, I would have to hire help, at least until Moody and Muir got bigger. Or maybe I should rent some of the land? I could sell off some cows since I wouldn't be able to milk the four or five Tom had. The burned-over pasture might not support so many head.

As I set in the stillness by Tom's body it occurred to me I did not even know where he kept his money. Many a time I'd seen him count the day's earnings into the cigar box and close
it. Sometimes he carried it upstairs where he slept on the pallet. It was just a pasteboard box that he used to put under the bed when he was sleeping with me. I had never paid it much attention, but I knowed he kept the money near where he slept. I would need the box to pay for things. But I did not want to climb the ladder in the dark and maybe wake Pa and the children.

I looked under the bed and of course the box was not there. The rocks and bricks was cooling, and I shuddered at the sight of them. Dirt still clung to the rocks and give off a strange baked smell. Where else might he have put the cigar box? I looked around the room and saw the chest of drawers. Only two of the drawers was used by Tom for his socks and underwear. I opened the drawers one after the other. I found the little jug Dr. Match had give me long ago, but there was no cigar box there. A pain went through my chest when I saw Tom's washed and folded underclothes.

The cedar chest set just under the window and I lifted its top as slow and careful as I could. The smell of the cedar rose in the dark like a vague memory. I felt among the quilts and blankets and my wedding dress, and found a silver spoon Pa had give me as a little girl. The spoon was cold as ice.

I stood and looked at Tom on the bed, and then I looked around the room again. The wardrobe loomed in the shadows almost to the ceiling. I opened the creaky door and felt among the shirts and suspenders on the shelf above the hanging clothes. There was the cigar box. With trembling hands I slid it from under the shirts and carried it to the lamp. The box was heavy as a clock.

When I opened it the cigar box give off the fragrance of metal, of nickels and silver, of copper and folded bills that had mildewed. I was almost afraid to touch the contents. The money was Tom's most private covenant. There was many twenty-dollar gold pieces and stacks of five and ten dollar bills tied with thread. There was a lot of silver dollars and dimes also. There was a big faded bone button, and I knowed what it was. It was the button from Tom's daddy's uniform that had been brought back from the prison camp in Illinois with the gold watch. All those years Tom had kept that button and never told me he had it.

I counted more than four hundred dollars in gold pieces. And then I saw a piece of yellowed paper under the coins. It was a clipping from an old newspaper. I opened it in the lamplight and saw it was a wedding announcement. “Mr. Benjamin Peace of Green River announces the marriage of his daughter Virginia to Thomas Powell.. . .” It was just a square of paper cut from the
Hendersonville Times
after our wedding and kept by Tom. The paper was ragged from the wear of the coins.

I put the cigar box on the table and looked at Tom. His face was gray now and his lips almost black. I thought of all he had give me, of the joy of his loving, and the children, of the work he had done to the house and the place, and the box of money. I thought of the terraces he had made on the orchard hill to hold back the topsoil in the worst rains, and the jugs of golden molasses in the smokehouse. He had give me more than I had even dreamed of. Locke had been right. I had thought I had give the Peace land to Tom, but the truth was he had give it to me.

It was such a waste that we had fought all those years. But saddest of all was that I could never repay him, or thank him, or tell him that I loved him. I wanted to tell him we was in his debt, not him in ours. I wanted to say I accepted his gifts.

I decided it would not be fair to wake Pa so near daylight. He would get up anyway soon to make coffee and read his Bible in the kitchen. Why not let him sleep as long as he would? There would be plenty of time for him to learn Tom was gone and to walk over the hill to tell Joe and Lily and Florrie and David. They would all come down and try to help and comfort me. The house would be crowded for several days. Joe would start building a coffin out at the shed where Tom had made one for the baby. Florrie would be rushing around the kitchen, and thanking folks that brought dishes. For days people would be condoling me and patting me on the back. Somebody would have to write to Locke.

I took a long deep drink from the whiskey jug and set in the silence as though it was a cool bath on a hot day. Silence is the language of God, I thought. He prefers to speak to us that way, and through our own voices. I wanted to wait a while longer and study about things. I might not be able to think this clear again for a long time. I wanted to figure it out a little more, to see if there was some way I could understand what had happened to me. What did it come to? Soon there would be light outside. Birds would start making a racket in the junipers and hemlocks. As quick as I heard Pa stirring I would get up and tell him, and begin working. There was a lot that had to be done before Florrie arrived and ordered me to set down and rest.

“I think we can all see ourselves in Ginny and Tom, in the way they are full of desire and loyalty, yet deeply frustrated when things don't work out as they plan. When we come to an understanding of ourselves and others, it is often too late to use it. I believe that sense of shared intimacy, pain, loss, that kinship and recognition of kinship, is the main reason we read fiction, and the main reason that we write it.”

—R
OBERT
M
ORGAN