A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [27]
Howard and I had moved around each other with exaggerated care, unsure of what lay beyond politeness. He went out in the morning, and that’s when I put my head in my pillow and stared into the blank white cotton. In the last two days, when he had come in from chores, he had found me sputtering apologies. He had told me to please be quiet more than once. There was no arguing, no shouting in indignation, because he’d told me to stop talking. He knew what was proper: It was stupid to invoke the spirit of the dead lamb, Buster we had called him, which Nellie had served for dinner in the form of chops. It was cowardly to suggest that we dry up the cows and go somewhere for a few weeks, until the worst was over. “Please, Alice,” he had said, “let’s just keep quiet and get through this.”
I hadn’t realized at first, in line, that Howard’s lower lip was trembling, that he was fighting to compose himself. As he turned away from me I understood that none of the last week had been real for him until now. He wiped his nose on his new sleeve. I felt as if I could see through his suit, to his hairless chest that despite his supernatural strength, had always reminded me, not of hard manly strength but of china, smooth white china that would shatter if you weren’t careful. I remembered how at the hospital Howard had said that he felt we were outside of time and circumstance, and then after it was over, back at home, he had had his blissful routine, hours in which work was rest. He had done the chores alone, thankful, I’m sure, for the numbing tasks. His rusted irrigation rig was leaking and the cow had prolapsed. He hadn’t wanted to call the vet and spend at least a hundred dollars just to see him show up, so he had pushed the uterus back in, and sewed her with a shoelace and a darning needle, and given her a shot of penicillin. It was probably unheard of for a dairy farmer to take that kind of risk with such an expensive animal. If she died from infection he would be so sorry he meddled, and if she got through it he would be a champion farmer.
The last few days for Howard had been made up of action. It stood to reason then that for him the church service was the time to feel. Maybe he was remembering how we had seen Lizzy in the hospital nursery when she was four hours old. There was one photo album and the video of the second birthday party. Her face was covered with white frosting, a balloon popped, and she cried. Dan and Theresa had probably spent their time since her death talking together, about what a fine baby she had been, how she crawled and stood and walked, irrepressible she was, all in the same month. They would shake their heads and wonder at how extraordinary she’d been. They’d go over and over their little stockpile of stories until there was no point in repeating them. They swore they would keep her memory alive, swore it, and swore it. But she slipped away even as they spoke. Maybe they’d have other children and move to a different state. When Audrey was a teenager she would occasionally remember that there’d been a sister who had drowned in the neighbor’s pond, the baby who was frozen in the photograph in the den.
I remember feeling as if I was at quite a distance from the gathering, that I was much more composed than I should have been. Theresa, who knew from her practice as a family therapist, had told me once