Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [50]
When Tig and the boys got back, they all ate the biscuits, with honey on them, and drank tea with hot milk in it. They sat casually around Nell’s orange table with their elbows on it, just like a family.
I’m the only person here who isn’t related to anyone, thought Nell. She was feeling cut off. She didn’t get into the city very often any more, and when she did it was on business – she met with publishers, and with the authors whose books she was editing – so she didn’t see her friends very much. In addition to which, her parents weren’t speaking to her, as such, though they weren’t not speaking to her either. Conversationally, she’d been put into a grey zone, a lot like a bus station waiting room: cold air, silences, topics limited to states of health and the weather. Her parents hadn’t got used to the fact that Nell had actually moved in with a man who was still married to someone else. She’d never been so blatant, in her former life. She’d given some thought to appearances. She’d been sneakier. But now that her change of address cards had so flagrantly been sent, there was no comfort room left for sneakiness.
Nell threw her energies into a kitchen garden. There were groundhogs in the fields, so she began with a fence; Tig helped with it. They set the bottom edge of the chicken wire a foot into the earth so the groundhogs couldn’t tunnel under. Then Nell dug in a lot of the well-rotted cow manure from the heap she’d found in the barn. There was enough of it to last for years. Beside the front door there was a knobbly, straggly rose; she pruned it back. She pruned some of the apple trees too. She’d taken a new interest in sharp implements – shears and clippers, picks and shovels, pruning saws and pitchforks. Not axes; she didn’t think she could handle an axe.
By this time she’d read up on the local pioneers – the people who’d arrived in the area in the early nineteenth century and had cleared the land, chopping down the trees, burning their trunks and branches, arranging their gigantic roots into the stump fences that were still to be seen here and there, slowly decaying. Many of these people had never used an axe before they’d come. Some of them had chopped off their legs; others had stood in buckets while using their axes in order to avoid that fate.
The soil of the garden was good enough, though there were a lot of stones. Also shards from broken crockery, and medicine bottles of pressed glass, white and blue and brown. A doll’s arm. A tarnished silver spoon. Animal bones. A marble. Layer upon layer of lives lived out. For someone, once, this farm had been new. There must have been struggles, misgivings, failures, and despair. And deaths, naturally. Deaths of various kinds.
While Nell worked in the garden, Tig went out and about. He drove up and down the side roads, exploring. He went into Garrett and tried out the hardware store, and set up an account at the bank. The in-town grocery store – not to be confused with the boxy new supermarket on the outskirts – had a sign in the window for eggs: BONELESS HEN FRUIT. On his return from these excursions, he’d tell Nell about such discoveries, and bring her gifts: a trowel, a ball of twine, a roll of plastic mulch.
There was a combination gas station and general store at the nearest crossroads; Tig began to drink coffee there with the local farmers, the older ones. They viewed him as an oddity, he said. They hadn’t tossed him into the bin of contempt to which they consigned most people from the city. He drove a rusty car and didn’t wear a tie and knew what a ratchet set was: all to the good. But he wasn’t a farmer either. Nonetheless, they let him sit in on the coffee sessions, where he picked up farming hints and gossip. They even began teasing him a bit, a development he reported to Nell with some glee.
Nell didn’t go along on these jaunts; she wasn’t invited. The rule for the farmers’ coffee group was men