A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [30]
“No,” I said to Howard, “don’t force me.” I began to cry as I said again, “Don’t force me.” I turned around, tripping over the brogans, stepped flat on someone’s sandals, and then pushed my way past the sweating people in the doorway. Once I was in the parking lot I lit out. I ran without seeing, past the cars, down into the ravine, across the highway, and into the Jacksons’ cornfield. I was sure I could hear her, Mrs. M. L. Glevitch, telling everybody, announcing through her megaphone, that the pathologically sick girl was running from the funeral. What a story she could make of it, having seen it with her own eyes! Not to mention the fact that her own steel-toed shoes had been stepped on by the girl herself! There had been no doubt in her mind right off that the tall blond one was the culprit; you could tell by the eyes shifting, not daring to look at you straight.
I ran until I got to a grove of trees, a narrow, wooded corridor that rose steeply above the field. I climbed and stumbled, grabbing at thin, tender saplings, breaking them while great clods of dirt rolled down the incline. I kicked a rotting trunk so hard I fell down and sat. My pumps were covered with dirt and dust. I pulled them off, threw them aside. “Come back,” I whispered. “Come back.” The crumbling earth was rough and uneven and cool. It felt good to lie down. Even up on high the ground was quaking from the traffic out on the highway. I remember hearing a truck with muffler problems, roaring in the distance. I remember thinking that there wasn’t anyone who could help me, no one who could comfort me, no place to go for forgiveness. I had the notion that maybe, just maybe, the roar was the Giant Earth-Moving Machine, the Gem of Egypt, coming to pick me up in its massive claw and rock me back and forth, back and forth, until I was fast asleep.
Chapter Five
——
NELLIE STOOD BY THE stove frying bacon the morning after the funeral. She was telling me how her world had collapsed when her second son was stillborn. She was carefully turning the sizzling meat with a fork, saying that she had labored twenty hours, and before she could speak her mind they knocked her out. “When I woke up no one said anything. I asked where my baby was and the nurses just went about their business, Ho hum. The doctor came in around ten and told me. Walt was away on business and couldn’t get home because of snow.”
I knew she was making a valiant attempt to help me come out of myself, to make me aware of the fact that other people had also suffered. I stared at the table thinking only that Nellie and I were nothing alike. Mother Nature, with her own irrefutable logic, was to blame for the son’s attenuated beginning and premature end. There was no reason for Lizzy’s death, no cause except carelessness.
“His birthday comes and I still feel the loss,” Nellie was saying.
“Huh,” I said, stirring my cereal. I had long since been the age to inflict damage, and yet I hadn’t gotten used to the fact that my own generation had inherited the earth for the time being. The boy I had shared a post-office box with in college was the head architect for a forty-million-dollar museum in Fort Worth. It seemed improbable that a thirty-two-year-old knew enough to keep such a large structure from caving in. There was fear and danger in everything, and it was a wonder we weren’t all paralyzed by the possibility of death, the threat of disaster in the routine pleasures of cars, toasters, the air, tuna fish, our friends. Nellie might have done something that seemed to her reasonable, such as scrubbing the bathtub with a powerful cleaning agent, only to find that it had leached through to her skin and into her blood and killed her child.
Despite my rational mind that had always kept me from faith; in spite of the fact that I had always suffered from what I had, in the 1980s, been able to identify as low self-esteem, I couldn’t help feeling