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By Root 840 0

same time. If Alice was convicted we might live our lives on parallel tracks. She on the inside, the girls and I on the outside. We would visit at regular intervals. She might get to come to Emma’s eighth-grade graduation. She’d shuffle along in her manacles for the first outing of her prison life. The evening news would cover the touching story. I wondered then if Alice’s present imperturbable state might not last her for the rest of her days. She might insist upon my release, calmly laying out for me our divorce, the name of my future wife, the training necessary for my new occupation. She might think I could leave her to be counted at the wake-up call day after day until she died of a prison epidemic. She might spend a good part of her time writing Emma and Claire, reminding them of that dog caught on its leash, wound around the tree. The dog was the one thing I managed to save.

“Daddy,” Emma grumbled, “I said, ‘When is Mom coming home?’ You aren’t even listening to me.”

“September,” I said. “October.”

“How many minutes?”

I did a quick calculation. If she got out in six weeks, in the middle of September, which certainly wasn’t going to happen, but if she did, it was somewhere in the neighborhood of forty-three thousand minutes. That sounded manageable. “Forty-three thousand,” I said.

“Oh.” She was satisfied. She stooped down to pet a kitten she’d tamed. “Do you think cats know how they look?” she asked. The scruffy white one in her hands had a black nose, one black eye and a black circle on its back.

“No,” I said.

“I wouldn’t want her to know she’s ugly.”

If I’d been in the mood it would have been time for an allegory. I kept moving down the aisle. My father used to tell me the story of my great-grandfather, solely as a scare tactic. I was the only child and worse yet, a son. My father had to tell me what could go wrong in life so that I stood a better chance of avoiding the pitfalls. There was no reason for me to repeat anyone else’s mistakes. He was determined I make something of myself. The great-grandfather seems to have had a nervous breakdown after his third wife discovered she was pregnant with his ninth child. The two other wives had both died during or shortly after pregnancy. The grandfather took sick, is how the lesson came down to me. My great-grandmother supported the family by taking in laundry. Months later, long after the baby was safely delivered, the old boy came to his senses. When he fully understood what he had done to his family, how he had humiliated them and abandoned them, he died on the spot. So the story goes. I think my father needed to tell me about him not because it was family history, but because it taught the horror of Shame, the goodness of Duty.

I interrupted my rhythm of washing the udders and slipping on the milking units to watch the girls climbing barefoot on the hay bales in the corner. I didn’t know how they could stand the sharp tufts on their feet. The cows swished their tails and stamped. There’s a Bible verse my mother always used to say: “In the day of prosperity there is a forgetfulness of affliction: and in the day of affliction there is no more remembrance of prosperity.” She used to say things like that when I was going about my ordinary business. Memory does not serve a person well, is what I got out of that one. Not twelve hours had passed and my memory of the night before was changing. It was dispiriting, to think that something that had seemed good was going to go through several revolutions in my mind. The girls, already dirty so soon in the morning, had come to the barn to remind me that nothing is ever simple. I could insist to myself that the evening was one thing—two people responding to sadness. That’s how I aim to remember it. I also imagine that Theresa and I are each other’s best secret. Both of us probably think back to that night when we are in need of consolation and the idea of love. On the porch with the moon climbing ever higher I had thought that I loved her and that there couldn’t be anything wrong with loving her. In the morning light I knew