A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [58]
“In case you haven’t noticed,” Howard said, coming around the corner, “we need food. The list is on the table.”
I could feel my eyes going wider and wider, staring like a heifer will. “And congratulations,” he added, “for getting up.” The bad heifers never got over being skittish. I was tilting my head back and licking my lips.
“I can’t stop to talk now and you can’t either—” He nodded in the direction of Claire, through the door. She had taken a paring knife off the counter in the kitchen and was starting to spear a peach.
“Alice, will you look at Claire? I’m going now. Keep in motion, do you hear?” He moved to me, reaching for my shoulders, to shake me. I shuddered and backed off into the screen.
“What do you expect me to do?” It was a reasonable question. There was disease in the barn. The fence in the back pasture had come down, and the cows had been heading up to Vermont Acres. Lottie, the rebel cow, had stumbled into the backyard of a Mrs. Klinke, who had been hanging up her wash. Mrs. Klinke had responded as if it was King Kong who had peeked his face over her dish towels. The university team was coming again soon to do their research in spite of the fact that all of the crops were withering. I flew past Howard in a way that he would surely find dramatic and went up the stairs, back to our room, a place that I had always thought of as safe. He had suggested I use the words, “Keep in motion,” as a sort of mantra. He was so very capable when it came to motion. He could smother me with his pillow and then make love to me somewhat against my will, drag me to a therapist, shove grocery lists in my hand, but he had no hold over my inner life. He couldn’t stop me from standing on the vinyl tabletop at the school cafeteria and commanding everyone to applaud Mother Nature. I had tried to follow his directions because I trusted his instincts. I should have explained to him that I felt as if I had fallen from space into a well and that it would take more than a proffered human hand to get me out. The tub of melted, rancid butter had spilled on the dresser, onto the filthy runner. Emma was pummeling Claire in the living room. Howard shouted over the racket, “I’m leaving.”
From the bedroom window I watched him walk past the barn to the machine shed where the tractor was parked. He stopped and looked up to the subdivision. He was listening for the neighborhood boys on their all-terrain vehicles. They rode back and forth over his alfalfa, mashing it down. When he caught them they denied that they owned bikes, although they were stashed in plain view in the woods. Howard stood cocking his head, listening for the bikes. His posture was terrible. His chest was sunk in; he was nothing like a rooster claiming his dusty yard.
Claire was shrieking now. I walked downstairs, and I walked through the pantry and the kitchen and the mud room and into the bathroom. I slammed the door as hard as I could and then I pounded at it, and then kicked it open, and slammed it again, so that the paint chips went flying off like sparks, and the spice rack hanging above the stove fell off its hooks. The bottles tumbled down the cold air return. When I was done slamming I stormed into the living room, grabbed Emma in front by the cloth of her sleeveless shirt, and shook her. When both girls were wailing I matched their noise—“I’M GOING TO THE GODDAMN STORE, DO YOU HEAR?”
I kicked the toys on the walkway, opened the car door, sat myself in the driver’s seat, and started the engine. Music, at top volume, came from the tape deck, as if Howard’s cassette had been poised to narrate my situation: “Oh, hang down your head, Tom Dooley, Oh, hang down your head and cry. You killed poor Laura Foster—” I pushed at button after button on the console until I hit Eject. It was almost funny, coming upon that particular song, under the circumstances. There were a dozen songs on Side A including “Charlie Is My Darling,” “Loch Lomand,” and “The Ash Grove,” and yet “Tom Dooley” was the one, the words