Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [45]
Eventually I ended up at home, very late that night, I think, and my grief was so heavy that the house immediately filled with it, causing my parents and sister and brothers to take to their beds with fevers and sadness. I lay and stared at the wooden slats darting across the ceiling, unable to move. Geraldine snored next to me, her throat catching in her sleep, and the sound was like a hacksaw in my ears. I stared at the ceiling for what seemed like days, closing my eyes and just feeling the whoosh of air, calling back a sliver of the fantasies I’d had about Mary and me in the circus. My illness and grief were so severe that even my mother started coming into the room, yelling at me to get up or lying down next to me to comfort me. It was as if the grief had awakened something primal in her, and she began tending to me the way she would have once, back when she had convinced herself that I was almost normal. She mashed up potatoes into a paste, brought in fresh milk straight from the barn and forced it down my throat. She kissed my forehead, and I thought about how happy that would have made me once, before Mary had given me the world, before it had fallen apart again. Even Geraldine tiptoed in and out of the room, in keeping with the strange hush that had fallen over everything.
But it was harvest time, and the crops had no patience for such grief. Mary’s death was the biggest thing that had happened in years, I think, but there was no time for it, as much as everyone spoke and dreamt of Mary, imagining the water filling their own lungs and skin. While my family returned to the fields, one by one, to work from morning till night, I stayed in bed. It took many days for my own fog to begin to lift, and that was when Geraldine told me that Mary had been buried behind the library.
“They said she couldn’t be buried in the local cemetery,” she said, “because she died in sin.”
“Sin?” I repeated, dumbly, though I knew well enough what she meant, had heard my mother whisper the word outside my door. “Suicide,” she kept saying, in the same hushed tone she and her lady friends had always used to talk about Mary Finn.
“Matt Tompkins’s kid watched her,” Geraldine said, looking down, running her palm back and forth along the doorframe. “He watched her wade into the river by herself, and just stop and sink down into it. He had no idea what was happening.” She looked up at me and then down again.
I imagined it then, Mary sinking into the river, and it felt like a scene I remembered from somewhere. The memory beat against my head and skin, struggling to come into relief.
“Matt Tompkins found his son crouched down, holding on to a tree, crying. By then you were there, he said, and some others, pulling her out of the water. He said you didn’t make a sound.”
“The poem,” I whispered.
“What?”
“A gleaming shape she floated by / dead-pale between the houses high.”
“Tessa, are you okay?” Geraldine asked. I looked up at her and was surprised by the worry that crossed her face, how soft she seemed then.
“She read me so many stories,” I said, choking on the words.
“I know,” she said. “I saw you sneaking off to read the books she gave you. I saw you hiding them under your mattress.”
“You did?”
“Sometimes I would look at them.”
“She didn’t belong