A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [82]
Maybe I dreamed this. I’m not sure anymore. I remember, that first April, when we found the crocuses coming up all over the hillside in the back beyond the pond. Alice went to the slope and knelt. She turned to me, her face flushed with pleasure. She said, “Do you think the farmwife who planted these tried to imagine us as she dug the holes? Do you think she made a prayer for the farm? ‘Here’s hoping for another hundred years! Here’s hoping for Howard Goodwin!’ ”
Chapter Eleven
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IT IS A RULE of nature that taking a day off on a farm sets a person back at least a week. I had been keeping up with morning and evening chores and letting everything else slide. In the early hours, on Monday before the girls woke, I mustered the energy to kill the lamb that was half-dead. With five years experience I still considered myself new enough at killing. I was clumsy. I stunned the lamb with a blow to its head and then quickly slit its throat. I had killed the lambs and the chickens for food, and occasionally I had to kill something as a kindness. I knew that each time I slaughtered an animal I thought less about it, and that if I let it, the process might become pretty well mechanical. I struggled between wanting to numbly get on with the job, and the need to pause, to offer thanks to the breathing animal, to wonder at its essence before I knocked the life out of it.
I knew without looking past the front porch in those first weeks that each day something more was lost in the drought. It didn’t seem to matter much. Our life without Alice was wrong. After Rafferty failed to get the bail reduced, he told me that there was nothing to do but wait. His refrain was that one word: Wait. I don’t think he had any idea how cruel his pronouncements were. Nothing to do but wait. And just how does a person wait, I wanted to ask. I remember sitting in the chair in the living room, too tired to close the windows and doors against the continuous blast of scorched air as I skimmed over the library books I’d gotten on the legal system. The girls lay on the carpet, panting. It was strange, how in the heat and quiet they lost their childishness. Occasionally they’d rise up and put a Lego block on top of another. Snapping one block into the next used all their strength. They were like inner tubes with slow leaks as they sank back down to rest. They lay without pillows, with their heads turned sidewise, flat on the floor.
There was the reckless and false accusation to consider, and there was the simple fact of missing Alice, of needing her. I held on to that fact. It would have been easy to be distracted by the anger that had been unleashed against us. I had to remind myself over and over that the real reason we were listing and badly off course had nothing to do with the community uproar. It had everything to do with the absence of our navigator. She managed us. She managed our bodies and even our minds, our spirits. She put her foot down when we stank from the barn, and she informed me when I needed a haircut. She made me talk, something that has not been my strong point. She wanted to know about things like the Black Hawk War. Although she’d forget the major points between the tellings, she always seemed to be interested. She was ignorant about history, and in particular about her own times. “Who was Barry Goldwater again?” she’d ask. “What was it that happened at that convention in 1968, the one in Chicago?”
Without her, without the family, I might have worked night and day. Before supper she went out on the porch and rang the old dinner bell. I came, thirsty and hungry, back to our time and place. I remembered this: the food