Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [68]
“Fine for you to say,” said Lizzie. “You weren’t there.”
It was decided that Lizzie would stay on at the farm until some plan could be formulated. For one thing, she didn’t have any money. It was too late for her to go back to school this year, as she’d intended doing before the catastrophe of Dr. Hobbs.
She was seeing her new doctor once a week. The subject was family issues. She went for long walks around the farm, and dug vigorous holes in the garden. She wasn’t saying much to Tig and Nell, though she made friends with Gladys. She didn’t ride her, but she would run around in the barnyard with her, the cows moving aside to let them past, the sheep following behind. Her lassitude of the summer had been replaced by a ferocious energy.
Nell, who was now swelling visibly, watched through the window, a little envious: she wouldn’t be able to gallop around like that for a while. Then she went back to kneading the bread, letting herself settle into the soft curves, the soothing warmth, the peaceful rhythm. She thought they were all out of danger now; she thought Lizzie was.
Then, one crisp October night, Lizzie attached the vacuum cleaner hose to the exhaust pipe of the car, ran it in through the window, and turned on the motor.
Tig heard the motor running and went outside. By the time he got to her, he said, Lizzie had turned the motor off and was just sitting there. He said this was a good sign. He’d had to wake Nell up to tell her this. How could she have been asleep at such a time?
After getting herself under control, Nell came downstairs in her nightgown, with an old sweater of Tig’s thrown on top of it. She felt cold all over. Her teeth were chattering.
By then Lizzie and Tig were sitting at the kitchen table having hot chocolate. “Why did you do that?” Nell said to Lizzie, once she could speak. She was trembling with fright, and with what she would much later come to discover had been rage.
“I don’t want to discuss it,” said Lizzie.
“No. I mean, why did you do that, to me?”
“You’d cope with it,” said Lizzie. “You cope with everything.”
It wasn’t the same night that Gladys ran away, but Nell remembers it as the same night. She can’t seem to separate the two events. She remembers Howl barking, though it’s unlikely he would have done anything so appropriate. She also remembers a full moon – a chilly, white, autumnal moon – another atmospheric detail she herself may well have supplied. But a full moon would have been fitting, because animals are more active then.
It was the cows who’d set the tragedy in motion, on one of their periodic jailbreaks. They’d got the fence down again and had taken off for the nearest herd of other cows. Gladys, on the other hand, had made for the paved highway two miles away. She must have been bored with her little kingdom, she must have been tired of ruling over the sheep. Also, Nell hadn’t been paying enough attention to her. She’d wanted an adventure.
She was hit by a car and killed. The driver had been drinking, and was going fast. It must have been a shock to him to have flown over the top of the hill and seen a white horse standing right in front of him, lit up by the moonlight. He himself was only shaken, but his car was a mess.
Nell felt terrible about Gladys. She felt guilty and sad. But she didn’t want to indulge these feelings because they would cause upsetting chemicals to circulate through her bloodstream, and that might affect the baby. She listened to a lot of Mozart string quartets in an attempt to stay cheerful.
The next fall she planted a patch of daffodils at the front of the property, in memory of Gladys. The daffodils came up every year, and grew well, and spread.
They are still there. Nell knows that, because she drove past the farm a few years ago just to see it again. When was that, exactly? Shortly after Lizzie got married, and went in for home cooking, and gave up sorrow. Whenever it was, it was in the spring, and there were the daffodils, hundreds of them by now.
The farmhouse itself had lost its ramshackle