A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [205]
I had walked out into the old orchard, looking at the brown, hard, rotten apples still hanging on the trees. I remembered the night, after the funeral, when I’d run into Theresa and we had stood against the trees, talking. I was grateful for that accidental meeting. As much as it pained me to think of it, I loved that night, too. We hadn’t realized it at the time but the conversation had been our chance to make an ending. It had been a suitable and good end.
I stood looking out across the fields, knowing, I thought, every stone, each clump of dirt, calling all of it ours. I wanted to take something, but I couldn’t think what it should be. In the end I looked, and closed my eyes, holding it, keeping it. I had driven home then, back to Spring Grove, and we had spent the afternoon in the kitchen, cooking our long overdue Thanksgiving dinner. Howard had thought of it, had thought to haul the turkey out of the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. I made one of Nellie’s famous Jell-O salads, and pumpkin pie with the last of Howard’s wheat flour. He peeled potatoes and, with Nellie’s blow-by-blow instructions over the phone, pulled together her sacred stuffing. Shortly before the food was ready the girls became insufferable. We fed them hot dogs and put them to bed. We came back downstairs, and by the light of two candles we sat before our feast.
We ate in silence for a while. We both knew we weren’t going to be able to talk about the farm for a time; we couldn’t talk about the future because we had no idea what or where it was. The present itself had for so long been uncertain, and we weren’t ready to rehash the details and the chance that had brought us back to solid ground. We tried to find our way. I told him a few more bits and pieces about Dyshett and Sherry and Debbie, and he told me about the dream life of the Indians who lived a billion years ago in Wisconsin. After the meal we put the turkey and Jell-O and stuffing into the refrigerator, and blew out the candles, leaving the entire mess of the afternoon and evening in darkness. There were no lights on in the house anywhere and we fumbled up the stairs to bed.
I had gotten down under the covers and was waiting for him to wind his clock and slide in next to me. He sat, his elbows on his thighs, his head in his hands.
“What is it?” I asked. “Is it the farm?”
He shook his head. “That’s not what’s bothering me. I don’t know, Alice. I don’t know.”
Although I couldn’t have said what it was he needed to tell me, I had the sense of its color, its shape; it was like a small black haze hanging over him. It was something that he would say that would change us, again. I thought of what he had come through, losing what he loved most, and I thought too of the separate journey I’d taken, the anger I’d felt at him in jail for the hundreds of little betrayals, and then how I’d come to have faith that at some point those feelings would be washed clean. For him, perhaps nothing had come clean. He lay down with his back to me. I could feel him shaking. I cried some, too, then, holding him in my arms, kissing his hair, feeling what for Theresa came easily, and what for me had always been difficult. All the same I knew I was forgiving him. I had that miraculous clarity for an instant and so I understood that the forgiveness itself was strong, durable, like strands of a web, weaving around us, holding us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane Hamilton lives, works, and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Wisconsin. Her short stories have appeared in