While Mortals Sleep_ Unpublished Short Fiction - Kurt Vonnegut [47]
She felt old because her husband, Ed, who really was old, had died and left her alone on the hog farm in northern Indiana. When Ed died, she had sold the livestock, rented the flat, black, rich land to neighbors, read her Bible, watered her houseplants, fed her chickens, tended her small vegetable garden, or simply rocked—waiting patiently and without rancor for the Bright Angel of Death. Ed had left her plenty of money, so she wasn’t goaded into doing anything more, and the people in the area, the only area Annie knew, made her feel that she was doing the right thing, the customary thing, the only thing.
Though she was without relatives, she wasn’t without callers. Farm wives came often for an hour or two of stifled pity over cakes and coffee.
“If my Will went, I just don’t know what I’d do,” said one. “In the city, I don’t think folks really know what it is to be one flesh. They just change husbands as often as they please, and one’s as good as another one.”
“Yes,” said Annie, “I certainly wouldn’t care for that. Have another peach surprise, Doris June.”
“I mean, in the city a man and woman don’t really need each other except to—” Delicately, Doris June left the sentence unfinished.
“Yes, that’s true,” said Annie. One of her duties as a widow, she had learned, was to provide dramatic proof to the neighboring wives that, bad as their husbands might be at times, life without them would be worse.
Annie didn’t spoil this illusion for Doris June by telling her about the letters—telling her what she had discovered so late in life about womanly happiness, telling her about one man, at least, who could make her happy from as far away as Schenectady.
Sometimes other women’s husbands came to the farm, too, gruff and formal, to perform some man’s chore that their wives had noticed needed doing—patching a roof, putting a new packing in the pump, greasing the idle machinery in the barn. They knew she was a virtuous widow, and respected her severely for it. They hardly spoke.
Sometimes Annie wondered how the husbands would act if they knew about the letters. Maybe they would think she was a loose woman, then, and accept her formal invitations for coffee which were meant to be declined. They might even make remarks with double meanings and full of shy flirtation—the sort of remarks they made to the shameless girl behind the coffee counter in the diner in town.
If she’d shown the men the letters, they would have read something dirty into them, she thought, when the letters weren’t at all like that, really. They were spiritual, they were poetry, and she didn’t even know or care what the man who wrote them looked like.
Sometimes the minister came for a visit, too, a bleak, fleshless, dust-colored old man, who was overjoyed by her deathlike peace and moral safety.
“You make me want to go on, Mrs. Cowper,” he said. “I wish you could talk to our young people sometime. They don’t believe it’s possible for a person to live a Christian life in this modern day and age.”
“That’s very kind of you,” said Annie. “I think all young people are kind of wild, and settle down later. Have another raspberry delight, won’t you? They’ll only spoil, and I’ll have to throw them away.”
“You were never wild, were you, Mrs. Cowper?”
“Well—of course I married Ed when I was just a little better than sixteen. I didn’t have much chance for running around.”
“And you wouldn’t have, if you’d had the chance,” said the minister triumphantly.
Annie felt a strange impulse to argue with him and tell him proudly about the letters. But she fought the wicked impulse, and nodded gravely.
A few would-be lovers called, too, with honorable intentions and a powerful lust for her land. But, while these callers spoke clumsy poetry about her fields, not one made her feel that she was anything more than what she saw of herself in the mirror—a tall, lean woman, as unornamental as a telephone