Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [19]
He dares not concern himself with the future for fear of disturbing the present—but the thought sometimes comes of a satisfaction even fuller than what he knows—of a more commodious house, lit in the evenings with brighter lamps and perhaps—why not?—children asleep in the rooms overhead. In his early married days Cuyler Goodwill came close to weeping as he observed the arrangement of his wife’s kitchen shelves, the stacked plates and separated cutlery, the neatly stored foodstuffs—rice, flour, sugar—that represent her touching, valiant provisioning for the future, but, in fact, it is only the present that he requires.
It is miracle enough to find that love lies in his grasp, that it can be spoken aloud, that he, so diffident, so slow, so thwarted by the poverty of his own beginnings, is able to put into words the fevers of his heart and at the same time offer up the endearments a woman needs to hear. The knowledge shocked him at first, how language flowed straight out of him like a river in flood, but once the words burst from his throat it was as though he had found his true tongue. He cannot imagine, thinking back, why he had believed himself incapable of passionate expression.
This is what he thinks about as he walks home from the quarry, how in a mere two years he has been transported to a newly created world. (With the toe of his boot he kicks along a loose stone, exactly as a schoolboy might do, and he draws into his lungs the dry smell of dust suspended over the fields. Nothing will ever seem so fine to him as the air on the Quarry Road in July of the year 1905.) His body at the end of the afternoon is pleasantly tired, but he cherishes each minor ache of bone and muscle, knowing that his day, even an ordinary Monday like today, will be rounded by rapture.
He will wash himself clean when he arrives home, eat a good supper washed down by tea, and enter forthwith, before the sun has sunk from view, that other reality, wider and richer than any mere bed might be thought to afford: the gathering of tenderness, rising blood, a dark downward swirl of ecstasy, and then—this seems to him particularly precious—the miraculous reward of shared sleep, his beloved beside him, her breath dissolving into his. A coil of her hair will be loosened on the shared pillow and without waking her he will kiss the tips of this hair.
What a distance he has come! Now when he looks into the faces of other men, even his own dull-witted father, he thinks: so this is what the world offers us in exchange for our labor—this precious spark of joy!
A breeze is coming up. He’s walking faster now. The Quarry Road takes him across flat, low-lying fields, marshy in spots, infertile, scrubby, the horizon suffocatingly low, pressing down on the roofs of rough barns and houses. A number of Galician families have settled lately in this area, building their squat windowless cottages which the women plaster over with a mixture of mud and straw. At one time he would have looked at such houses and imagined nothing but misery within. Now he knows better. Now he has had a glimpse of paradise and sees it everywhere.
Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the kindest thing I can say for it. Other accounts are required, other perspectives, but even so our most important