A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [158]
Lying between the cool hospital sheets I tried to remember, to feel, the black water on my skin. I remembered being afraid that night at the pond, that Howard, the Howard who was so sure of animal husbandry, auto mechanics, and history—his beautiful face, his hair wet and slicked back, his marmoreal torso—I remember fearing that he was bound to go up in flames with no notice. That night I had wanted to swim to him and yet I wanted to think of him always there on the dock, safe and waiting for me. I had fluttered my hands and kicked my feet trying to stay in place, out of my depth.
Always my thoughts of the water, of Howard, led me to the farm itself and the worry I had that he might try to sell it. It was irrational, I knew. Rafferty had explained to me that the farm was what we had in our favor, the thing that rooted us to Prairie Center. Howard wasn’t prone to impetuous behavior and he would be able to keep the faith, I always told myself, keep the faith that we could outlive everyone in Prairie Center, closed up in our house, secure in the woods. I was sure we could outlast everyone, until all the faces pressing against the glass were nothing more than a mild, unpleasant dream. It was impossible to imagine Howard without the farm. I couldn’t think what would fill his days and his nights. What would replace the map that was securely lodged in his brain, a weather map complete with every weather possibility? Clouds: cirrocumulus undulatis, stratus uniformis, a plain old cold front floated before his eyes even as he looked at the night sky. In my worst moments I pictured Howard coaxing the shy postmistress down at the Prairie Center P.O. out of her cage with a pail of fresh warm milk only because he knew that if he merged their stamp collections they would make a fortune. Helen, that was her name, and Howard! They belonged together. Emma and Claire would have brothers and be blended.
I had learned as a child that it is foolish to take anything for granted, and so I knew that it was possible that in my short absence Howard could fall blindly in love with Postmistress Helen. He would do well with someone who liked to weigh concrete objects and count out change and deliver goods. Mrs. Glevitch would say that it served me right, that that’s what happened when you let a decent man out of your hands. I tried to imagine taking up with Luther Tritz, the band director, once I was sprung, living a life of exile like the Duchess and Duke of Windsor, quarreling in between our games of blackjack, and all on Luke’s meager allowance. A fly had somehow made its way up the stairs in the hospital and was buzzing near my tray. I gave it a second look, one of God’s creatures, a dirty insect that we took for granted and treated with contempt. How charming he was, washing himself with his feet, how dapper the gray stripes were, running down his body. I might take him back to the jail girls as a token from my trip abroad.
While nothing was impossible, nothing, not life imprisonment, not death, or the keeping of a fly in a shrine, I wondered if it was remotely possible that something, a shred, to be sure, of the old life, could be salvaged. The old life: Howard, arms bronzed up to his T-shirt, cultivating the corn, thinking about his cows, the storm systems, the farmers who’d come before him, the Blackhawk War, the wonder of growing vegetable matter from a place as unlikely as the ground. And I, upstairs on the porch, with the shades drawn, dancing by myself. All the while our girls would grow up, making their lives out of the pieces we’d given them. Ordinary life was laced with miracles, I knew that, had read enough poetry to understand that we are elevated with the knowing, and