A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [203]
The Saturday after the trial I asked him if I could use the car, that I’d like to run a few errands. I think he knew where I was going because he stood in the middle of the kitchen floor pondering my request before he dug in his pocket for the keys. I drove out of town slightly under the speed limit, inspecting the Christmas decorations and the fields, beautiful in their drabness. I imagined I didn’t know I was driving back to Prairie Center.
I had always liked December because it was the beginning of the quiet season. The crops were in, the house was full of food, we were ready for any siege, and we could rest. In the mornings before Howard went out for chores he’d start a fire in the stove, so that when I came down to get breakfast there was always the good warmth and smell of wood burning. Although I had had to go to work I often felt, just for a moment, that we were all shut in, in the glow of the generous hearth, in the house where there was color and music, the thick smell of our life that would go on and on despite the naked trees shivering, the bare, cold world outside. Then of course I had to chase to get dressed, to wake the girls, to stir the oatmeal, to pack lunches, to find mittens, to make a grocery list. But there was often that moment, coming down the stairs, turning on the dim yellow light over the stove, loving our shelter.
When I got to Prairie Center I parked up the way by the old Kresler place and then walked along the road the quarter mile or so to the farm. I had wanted to come back since I’d been let out in September, but I hadn’t had a way to get there during the week, and I wouldn’t have had time anyway, with Emma gone for a short morning at school. I knew that Howard had driven over on the weekends a few times, to get lumber and furniture, but I had not had the nerve to ask him to take us. It was clear that he hadn’t wanted us to come.
He had mentioned that the Boy Scout people were going to take the house down. It didn’t look like much, and it would require more money to make sound than it was probably worth, and if it stood empty it would only invite vandals. I walked in through the woods by the road. The house had been a good place, but I had been trying to tell myself, day after day, that we would find another. The woods were a different matter. I used to come out on winter nights, when the sky was heavy with stars. The shadowy trees, dignified and knowledgeable, seemed as much a part of the heavens as of earth, and I’d get the feeling that it wouldn’t take much of anything to step into the blackness of the sky, that there wasn’t any magic to becoming a part of it.
On that December day I walked over the carpet of wet brown leaves, touching the gray trunks, one after the next. I could see the pond, dull and still, in the distance. I leaned against an enormous burr oak and it came to me then, not only in my intellect, but also in my limbs, my blood, my skin: Lizzy wasn’t here in Prairie Center anymore. It was a comfort to feel the tree’s cold, spiny bark through my sweater, to feel my own fingers in my mouth. The grief, I knew, wasn’t really ever going to go away. I leaned there for a long time, feeling the sharpness, the weight of the thing that was