A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [134]
“Are you okay?” She came into the room and stood over me. Her eyes welled up with tears.
“Look,” I said, “we can’t stay here anymore. It’s so obvious I don’t know why I have to explain to you or to her. People don’t recover from this kind of charge. We’ll have to sell even if she’s acquitted. I think Alice is concentrating on surviving and she hasn’t taken into consideration the fact that we’re finished here. It’s over.” I started past Theresa into the kitchen. I turned, took her hand, kissed it. She stepped away and put both her hands behind her back. I shrugged and sat down. “Alice used to be so worried about certain people talking about her,” I said. “She used to think that old ladies were going to blab about her. I used to tell her to cut it out, that it was senseless to pay attention to rumor mongers. Now I see what there is to be afraid of: Talk. That’s it. Talk.
“And I don’t know why we ever thought we could farm here. A person needs community. I call up to Madison every time I think of doing something different. I want to ridge till, or start rotational grazing, I have to call a bloody academic. If we wanted to build a barn there’d be nobody to come for the raising. What am I talking about, anyway? There isn’t any such thing anymore. A barn. It would be a pole shed, not a wooden post-and-beam beauty. In Iowa all the farms are owned by about five corporations. There’s no future in the family farm. None. All the farmers were moving out of here just about the time we arrived. To this town we’re some city people who stepped in where we don’t belong. I used to think there were rules of nature. Strict rules. If you broke them you’d pay. But of course nature doesn’t give a damn about anything. It’s our own codes that are arbitrary, merciless. What’s wrong with us, that we don’t want a ranch house with a big round metal pool in the yard? Nobody cares that this ground means something to me, that I get satisfaction knowing that below our garden there used to be a path that the teamsters used. They brought their supplies into Prairie Junction with their wagons and oxen. You go out there and squint and you can just about see those fucking oxen.”
“If it means so much to you then you should stay,” she said. She was leaning over the table, about to take hold of my shoulder. Before she reached she thought better of it. “People have short memories. This will look like you’re running. Rafferty says—”
“I don’t care what Rafferty says! Do you understand? I don’t care what he says!” I was shouting in her face.
“You have a right to be here,” she said softly.
Claire distracted us by running into the kitchen and grabbing Theresa’s leg. “Is it time to go to your house?”
“No,” I said.
Claire, who had always been so even tempered, sat down on the floor and proceeded to bang her head against the cabinet.
“Oh, sweetie,” Theresa crooned, kneeling down and putting her arms around her, “it’s all right.”
“I want to go to your house,” Claire sobbed. “It’s cold there.”
“Let’s walk down to the pond,” Theresa said, looking up at me, but talking still to Claire. “You and Emma can play in the sand and wade. I can see you need to cool off. Isn’t that a good idea?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said.
“Look at your girls,” she commanded. “They are hot and uncomfortable. Claire has prickly heat on her neck, and down her back. She’s dirty, Howard. The pond shouldn’t be shut up, like someone’s ghostly bedroom. There’s no sense in the girls thinking it’s a bad place. There’s just no sense in that.”
I started to say that it was August already and that we’d used the pond every day to survive the heat. She was herding my children out the door, patting their heads, telling them she’d missed them. How many times, I wondered, had we, Alice and I, and Emma and Claire, walked the lane in the middle of a summer afternoon? We had thought of the pond as our perk. We didn’t have jobs that offered health insurance or a lunch tab, a company car, box seats at the sports arena. We had slow time on July days. Hot and sleepy, we used to make our way to the water’s