A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [63]
“Sunday?”
“You’re supposed to get here beforehand to register. I couldn’t stand for Emma and Claire to see this place. I couldn’t stand to have them go away again after fifteen minutes. You have to say you’ll promise.”
I was not planning on her stay lasting for more than another few hours.
“Howard,” she said, “are you listening? You have to promise.”
“Yes, I’m listening—”
“All right then. Call Rafferty.”
“Alice—”
“My time is up. Call Rafferty. Please.”
“What was that about?” Emma asked, from around the corner.
I was raised, along with millions of other boys, to strive, to compete, to work hard to get to a crucial destination. It was unspecified but all important. The cost of the trip was the accumulated sum of our school, church, and scout labors. We went to Sunday school and were told about God, but we also knew that His power was not much compared to Hard Work and the salvation of Free Enterprise. We were told that we could do anything if we put our minds to it, and wanted it badly enough. Mental strength then, and desire, were for us what constituted bravery. I thought, in my younger years, that there was some sort of design that I would unerringly become a part of in adulthood. I thought there was one singular pattern that was for me, and was mine alone. I would work and work and then I would be rewarded by receiving a plot of land and a dairy barn, a sign at the end of the driveway that said, The Howard Goodwin Family Farm. Registered Guernseys. Milk Producer of America.
I hung up the phone knowing that there had been a mistake, that I would get a hold of someone in Rafferty’s office, and with persistence—that’s what it would take—persistence, the whole thing would be cleared up in an hour or so.
“Mom had to go to Racine for a while, but she’ll be back,” I said to Emma.
“She didn’t really say good-bye to us,” she choked, looking out the window.
I sat down at the kitchen table and with one hand drew Emma to me and held her. With the other I stroked along the grain of the wood. We would drive in and demand to have her back. When Finn called he would understand the vagaries of the law and see where we could inch in and get our way.
“When will she be home?” Emma asked.
I kept smoothing my hand over the table. The farmer we bought the place from told us that the table was the one on which his great-grandmother served corn bread to the Indians up in Winston, a half hour or so from Prairie Center. I bet I’ve told that story to the girls twenty times. I make the table come alive and I tell the whole thing from its point of view. The year is 1836. It watches the Indians barge in with their scalp belts slung around their waists. They want to see the coffee grinder and the white baby. Our girls have gotten in the habit of begging me to tell them what’s happening today in the life of Emma and Claire Goodwin, from the view of the table. It has an uncommonly deep voice and it usually gives them good advice or a moral. I can’t put my elbows on the slab of oak without thinking of it taking us in, its clear eye watching me.
“It’s awful when you make supper,” Emma said. “You always mix everything together and I can’t undo it into piles.”
I had not given Emma any real answer or put her fears to rest about my cooking when Finn called. I uncoiled the long phone cord as I walked into the bathroom, closing the door behind me. I didn’t have much information. I had difficulty describing the problem. “My wife has been arrested, I think for s-s-sexual abuse.” I hadn’t stuttered in years, not since I was a kid. For a second I was as surprised by the sound of my own voice as I was by the strange story I was trying to tell.