A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [65]
That morning I had been going to fix the water tank in the upper yard, cut the rest of the lousy first crop of hay, and topdress the west field. I needed to worm the sheep, pay some bills, cultivate the soybeans. The hay was worrisome. There wasn’t going to be enough to last the year. And already there wasn’t good pasture for the cows because of the drought. Alice often complained that there wasn’t time to do anything well. I suppose she was right. She had once said something in anger that cut me to the quick. She had said that farming was only really about staying in the exact same place, that there was no moving beyond milk, beyond manure, beyond soybeans, that it was the same year after year. Nothing is farther from the truth. There are seasonal variations, medical challenges, new technologies to consider and balance against the proven ways. Each year there is new life. That morning last summer I had the sensation of standing still in a way I had never experienced before. It is not pleasant to feel still, forcibly still, stuck. I didn’t think that stillness was the variety that had worried Alice.
Later that afternoon I got between Emma and Claire on the sofa. I tried to read Hansel and Gretel to them. The air as well as the uncertainty had a suffocating effect. They couldn’t listen. When Hansel was making his trail the second time with bread crumbs Claire asked, “Can’t we take a bath?” They both sprang up to get towels and run the water. If Alice had seen me dusting, pulling out towels and cleaning supplies in the bathroom to wipe the shelves, she would immediately have realized the degree of my anxiety. There was already a distinction which would be with us for the rest of the summer. There was out there, beyond our front door. It was a shapeless and hot landmass with Alice on it, somewhere, picking her way home. The only other point of reference was inside our house. The rooms of our house were the things we owned and knew.
That afternoon I kept reaching for the receiver to put a call through to the American Embassy in Bucharest. After a minute I’d hang up. I wasn’t sure what message to leave for my mother. She used to ask after the crops and the animals, out of politeness. She didn’t know specifically what to ask because she didn’t have a working vocabulary for the farm. I always explained what I was doing, and why I thought it was interesting or necessary. If I called her over in Rumania she would have to ask detailed questions in order to get as much as a vague answer. When the phone rang at three o’clock I pounced on it.
“Howard—” Alice began.
“Are you out?”
There was a television on in the background there and I could hardly hear her. “The public defender just took the bar a month ago,” she said. “He was more nervous than I was.”
“Where are you?”
“Upstairs,” she said. I had to think if she could mean above me, in our bedroom. “Fourth floor, pay phone. I can call all I want now that I’m booked. Listen, they say there are other children coming forward with charges. The judge talked about how a public health worker is a person of trust and how angry communities are when that trust has been violated. That’s why the bail is unusually high. The lawyer thought I should have been given a chance at release on property or signature bonds, but I wasn’t. The judge set a cash bond.”
“How much?”
“Too much.”
“How much?”
“It’s wild, Howard—it’s, it’s one hundred thousand.”
One hundred thousand what? Horse chestnuts? Hickory nuts? We had five hundred dollars in a savings account which we had started when Emma was born, for college. We had weeks before not only refinanced the farm but borrowed ten thousand dollars from the bank for a hay bine, a baler, and a rack. The hay bine was a dream, conditioning the hay, cutting the drying time in half. With the pop-up baler I could make six hundred bales all by myself in an afternoon. If Alice and Dan helped I could do twice that. It was possible that I might be able to get several thousand dollars from my mother, but one hundred thousand—it might as well have