The Testament of Harold's Wife Read online

  With Harold spitting bitterness at Gary for making the boy walk the highway, a silence between them thickened. I knew Gary needed our comfort, but what was I to do? I saw it Harold’s way, though my heart was crushed by Gary’s mourning as well as Harold’s. Where was the space for my own? In my anger over being so pulled between them, I was neither wife nor mother. It was my Harold and his schemes I could have helped when he got crazy with grand revenge notions. But I didn’t. It’s a wasteful shame I didn’t know then how good I’d be at crazy thoughts. I wish I’d tried them sooner.

  And this is true, too: I didn’t wear it the way my Harold did, but I was mad at Gary, too. Sometimes he’d come, sobbing, and yes, I put my arms around my son, but my heart was cold and sick as I followed the twisting black thread of memory to how he’d first given Nicole reason to leave, and then put Cody on that highway to walk the distance home. Nicole had brought us close to our son in a way Harold and I had both lost for a while. She first, and then the gift of Cody in our lives, had made me—and Harold, too—feel the exquisite tenderness of the bond to Gary, that child we’d once gathered in our arms and held on our laps. Of course I grieved for Gary. I’m so sorry, I said, as I held him. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, son. I said it over and over, and perhaps it stood in for I’m so sorry your heart is shattered, my son. And that was true. But did he know, in that way children have of divining a parent’s intent, that I was also saying, I’m so sorry you did this, and I’m so sorry I can’t tell you that nothing is your fault, and I’m so sorry you didn’t do the right things?

  So here we are on the subject of fault, and it’s only fair that I look for mine. I knew Gary’s need was excruciating. He turned to me as a stand-in for his father when Harold couldn’t forgive. I can’t say I didn’t know what he wanted, what he needed. And aren’t parents our first stand-ins for God? So maybe those things I couldn’t say to Gary make it my fault that he started listening to preachers and revivalists until he found one who was certain, before his tent pushed on to the next county, just how much God liked big cash donations “for the needy” and that, having paid his way, Gary would for sure see Cody in heaven, big as life and twice as real, probably in his football uniform suited up for the Big Devil Game, if Gary gave double what he could possibly afford. Then after his father’s suicide, Gary decided he better get ordained on the Internet as an extra layer of heaven travel insurance, since the Bible says the Sins Of The Father Are Visited Upon . . . et cetera, so it would be Harold’s fault if Gary got Left Behind.

  Now he calls himself Reverend Gary, and he’s trying to start up his own church, with all kinds of new rules he makes up every day from this or that line from the Bible, generally out of some extra-useful Old Testament book like Judges. Or sometimes he jumps right over to Revelations. He’s renting a farmhouse ten miles out of town and holds services in the barn, which he got permission to paint white to be more holy, especially since it lacks a steeple as barns generally do. He had a huge banner made for the outside that proclaims, IT’S ALL ABOUT JESUS! in big, black capital letters, because the owner drew the line at painted signage on the building.

  If he had to get religion, I wish Gary had joined the Methodist church in town like a sensible person. But he was desperate to expiate what cannot be undone, desperate for forgiveness. What good would it do for him to know what I think about cash donations to a cult that promises that in return? Maybe CarolSue is right that silence is kinder than an indictment if you can’t give someone what he wants. I can’t give him what he wants, but I know I’m all that Gary has left. What will happen to him when I die? Will he watch me dwindle, giving the last of his money and losing faith because of the miracle that doesn’t happen?

  My son does all kinds of things to take care of me, most equally useful as Glitter Jesus, and he thinks I don’t appreciate his efforts to set me straight. He’s right about that, but I don’t come out and say so. He’s not strong, my Gary, with his oval blue eyes and too-red face, his curly blond hair that all makes him look like a raw, oversized, overage angel. People are more fragile than you think. People break. Who knows what could make Gary break? I try to be careful what I say around him even when it’s hard. Under all his certainty, I think he might be brittle as cheap glass.

  Come to think of it, I might be now, too.

  4

  Larry

  Two guys had taken turns forever pounding on something before they put rubber sheeting over it and got it on a long thing with wheels that slid into the ambulance. It made Larry wonder if it was a drag cart and if they’d put a deer down. The do-gooder was still there, crying now, talking to one of the cops.

  They were in the middle of nofreakingwhere, half into the divided highway with its yellow dashes down the middle, the brown stubble of harvested corn poking up as far as the eye could or couldn’t see on either side. Cops had set out glow sticks and kept their lights flashing, which was another reason he had to close his eyes. He felt like a bad kid, like he used to when it wasn’t his fault but his old man said it was, and his stupid sister and the stupid baby and the stupid dog were always just fine but he was supposed to stop causing trouble, stop doing this and stop doing that, and he got so mad, so mad he wanted to hurt someone for making him feel like crap. It wasn’t his fault.

  Three cop cars and an ambulance. Who calls an ambulance for a deer, for chrissake? He told the fat cop, told ’em, told ’em the same every time: it was a deer. Another cop, one with eyebrows like woolly worms tryin’ to reach each other, got right into Larry’s face, too, telling him to touch his finger to his nose, tryin’ to shame him like he’d wet the bed, like he was a kid, like everything was his fault, like he coulda helped runnin’ into a goddamn deer.

  Eyebrows acting like he was the man, putting hands on Larry and cuffing him. Goddamn cop tryin’ to make him feel like it was his fault. Reading him his goddamn rights like he was a criminal.

  “There was a deer, I told you.”

  “Well, okay, then, maybe you wanna take a Breathalyzer and that’ll show if you saw a deer?” That was Eyebrows talking.

  “That’ll show I hit a deer?”

  “Well . . . that’ll show . . . Over there.”

  “I can sit?”

  “Yeah.” Eyebrows took his elbow and walked him like he couldn’t walk himself to the cop car. Lights glinted off his badge when Larry looked behind him at the ambulance as the doors were shut, blurring lights red, blue, red, blue, red, the last sun over the western field red, the do-gooder’s coat, was that red? The light was confusing. The glow sticks were yellow and the ambulance moved. The fat cop was out directing traffic around Larry’s truck, cattywampus on the side of the highway, half on the shoulder, who put it like that? A few rubberneckers slowed down. Larry couldn’t even give them a one-finger salute because of the cuffs. Eyebrows put his hand on Larry’s head like he was a kid and didn’t know not to hit his damn head getting in a car. The backseat was caged off from the front.

  “You can sit right here in the car. This part goes in your mouth and you blow. Hey, was it a buck? Or maybe a doe?”

  “Buck . . . mebbe a doe. How should I know?”

  The sun was gone and so was the do-gooder. But the blue and red lights on the cop cars kept spinning and Eyebrows and the fat cop and the other one were still there, and dammit, so was Larry. Larry had needed to sit, he’d just wanted to sit, and they’d let him stay sitting in the cop car while they finished, but they didn’t take the cuffs off him and then they didn’t let him go.

  Fucking liars.

  5

  Louisa

  I hope there was a deer in the road, even though I know it’s about as likely as the Brooklyn Bridge with Christmas lights plunked down on old Route 50. But even though I know it was the driver’s lie, sometimes I comfort myself by imagining that different end for Cody and that a deer was the last thing Cody saw, not the pickup truck careening toward him. I see a beautiful buck standing still for him, trusting, and Cody’s eyes wide and soft
with pleasure. We’re here to teach our children and grandchildren, I know that. But sometimes we see things through their eyes and everything changes. Everything.

  It’s mainly farms around here, edged by creeks and woods. In deer season, men in orange hats and vests sneak around and lie in wait. Some of them set out corn as a lure. And Harold was one of the hunters. Gary would have been, but he’d quit when it turned out that he was the worst shot since the invention of firearms.

  Even though hunting is a featured attraction around here, Harold had never held a gun before he enlisted, but they were a big deal in basic training, and he wrote me that he had a good eye and a steady hand. It was after he got home from the war that he started with the hunting. He said the time alone was good for him, and even though I thought there was more to it, because he still had those dreams, I tried not to argue because it made things worse. At least he never sat in a blind where corn had been set out as a lure. My Harold was better than that. After all, those deer weren’t trying to kill him.

  The year that Cody was twelve, two years after my dad died, Harold and I had to sell Mom’s house and have her move in with us. Harold had taken Cody out hunting with him for the last few days; we were having the mysterious gift of an Indian summer in mid-November that coincided with deer season. I was banging around the kitchen slamming drawers with my hip and muttering, “Nothing lasts in this house.”

  I winced and looked around, hoping I was alone. Mom hadn’t been living with us long enough for me to remember to shut up when I was searching for what she’d put in some bizarre place, say ketchup in the freezer. But what I’d said bothered me like a bad omen. All I’d meant—at least at the moment—was that the spatula had disappeared, but the whole point of Mom living with us was so that she would last. I’d said it to Harold: If we don’t take her in, honey, she’ll never last.

  I was in a terrible mood. Nearly eligible for retirement and the great state of Indiana had decided that all teachers had to pass a CPR test in order to keep their jobs, never mind that I’d been working twenty-five years and didn’t have the name of a single dead student posted under mine.

  The Saturday morning I’m remembering was dismal, a grudging sky over the fields, and I’d had to grain our two horses after I made Mom’s breakfast, which made me late to class. Like I was the fifth grader, the instructor made me demonstrate what he’d been showing everyone, which I didn’t exactly know because I was late. But big, dumb Resusci Annie was lying on the floor, just waiting for me to restart her heart. Wouldn’t I love for someone to restart mine some mornings?

  I’d read the manual, though, so I found the spot and crossed my hands a notch above her sternum and I pumped and blew my life into hers, like I did every day with the kids in my class and my family, my life right into theirs. I got tired, like I did worrying over them. And the chickens and the livestock, not that we had much. I felt like screaming at Annie to buck up, for God’s sake, get up, go on, live, live, live. No such luck. The small green life light just flickered like a tease and then went out, meaning, I guess, that while I didn’t exactly kill her, I didn’t save her, either.

  When I got home to Mom, she was all stooped over and looking like a sneeze would knock her to the floor. She was thick enough around the middle and the hump of her back, but her arms and legs were so frail they put me in mind of dry sticks. I look at myself naked in the mirror now and I see my body evolving or devolving into hers. Mom’s palsy had gotten worse and worse. The way her head moved back and forth, it looked like she was saying, “No, no, no,” constantly. It grated me like cheese back then. Now I wonder if she was saying, No, I do not want this to be happening to me, and I wish I could tell her that I finally understand.

  “What’s going to happen to me, Louisa? I’m all alone. Daddy’s gone. I’ve got nobody,” she used to say, which made me want to tear out fistfuls of my hair. Or maybe hers. But I always tried to keep my voice patient and nice when I answered.

  “You’re not all alone, Mom. You’ve got me and Harold. We’ll take care of you. And you know how Cody loves you. A great-grandson, Mom. Now that’s something special. You can’t let Cody down.” Which was sort of switching the point, I know. I just used whatever might work.

  “You don’t understand. You can’t understand. But you’re a good daughter, Louisa, and I’m proud of how you went to college. First in the family ever. My breasts are gone, have you noticed? See?” she said, running her hands down the front of her blowsy shirt and working her body toward profile. Her breathing whistled through her false teeth like a February wind, and her body was cold to the touch. Sometimes, I couldn’t help it, I used to think of a chicken overly stewed and left to chill, the way her flesh seemed to be falling away from her body.

  “No, Mom, I hadn’t seen that,” I’d lie, “but I think it’s just normal.” Oh, she was right, I didn’t understand. I hope she didn’t know what I felt.

  Ours was always a random sort of a farm, acres of field corn backing up to Rush Run, the broad creek that runs behind it like a vein to the river, cutting its way through a mile-wide stand of old forest. Back then we had Alcott, Cody’s roan gelding, my beautiful flock of laying hens, and Bronson, the rooster; Ralph, the sheep—don’t ask me why—and Emerson and Thoreau, the yellow Labs. May and Marvelle presided in the barn. And our goat, Rose, had the yard much of the year. Harold could not abide mowing and we got her between the time Gary left home and Cody was old enough to mow. But by then Rose was taking care of the patchy yard grass well, and giving milk, besides.

  You see how little remains. What’s that expression? Life turns on a dime. Or a blink. Or a drink. A mistake. Someone else’s. Your own.

  But about the deer. The whole thing goes back to Mom and that same day after I got home from my CPR class. It had cleared to a gorgeous late sun. Harold was taking Cody hunting for the first time that year. He had taught him to shoot, and Cody had a gift with soup cans. He’s good, Harold used to marvel. What a shot.

  Harold had talked up how great it would be to hunt together, and Cody automatically wanted to do whatever his grandpa did. Mom didn’t want Harold to take Cody, and told Cody not to go. She’d lived in town all her life and couldn’t accept it. I tried to explain hunting to her the way Harold had first explained it to me, but the words weren’t mine and got stuck between my heart and my mouth. The truth is I think he liked having charge over something, as men do. Maybe when you make something else die, you don’t think about dying yourself, you think you’re bigger than dying.

  Cody was antsy. He hadn’t gotten his deer yet; it was the last day of the season and there’d be no more chances until next year. Twilight was coming on and he was going to lose his bet with Harold, which probably was for all of fifty cents. I was out by the barn emptying the heads of dead flowers into the compost when he came trudging up from the fields toward the house. He’d been all day in the woods our back fields skirt, trying for his deer. Harold wasn’t hunting then, just keeping an eye on Cody, which I’d been glad for, thinking that at least I knew he couldn’t accidentally shoot Cody. I didn’t know that it was the only thing I wouldn’t ever have to worry about. After that day, Harold would quit hunting forever.

  “I need bullets,” Cody called to me, a slump of crimson dejection in no big hurry, his long shadow preceding him, rifle over his shoulder the way Harold had taught him. “Only one left in the chamber. Didn’t bring enough.” He’d taken shots and missed. I’d known about the shots; faint retorts had come from our south side much earlier when I was hanging wash on the line.

  It was by pure chance that I spotted it, plainly out in the second field that drops down to our woods, where Rush Run hurries on to get to another world. I gestured to Cody, who was nearly to the back step by then. The deep-blue and purple-grey shadows edging out from the woods kept me from seeing whether it was buck or doe, and Cody only had a youth permit for buck—but later the boy said he’d spotted the huge rack shining as though by moonrise or last sun, like something
not quite of this earth, as he reversed and turned toward his target in the russet of late autumn. I even prayed. “Dear God,” I said. “Let my grandson get that deer; he’s only got one bullet.”

  What was I thinking?

  I went in. Then I heard the gun. It was close enough that Mom did, too, even upstairs in her room, and, of course, it scared her pale, until I told her what Cody was after.

  “If he got it, have him bring it around so I can see it up close,” she said. Mom was trying, I could tell, she was trying to keep a hold on herself, to listen to me and get used to it here, to put things in what I’d said were their right places. I even asked her again.

  “Are you sure, Mom? You know, it’s different from what you’re used to.” I didn’t want to tell her that I’d never gotten used to this, only pretended to for my husband.

  “I told you, Louisa, have him bring it around.”

  I watched between the yellow print curtains at the kitchen window for Cody to come back while I started supper. Our rooster, Bronson, was perched on the head of the cement goose Harold had bought at the fair, his idea of a joke because I’d said I’d like some geese in our little back pond. When Harold set it outside the back door, poor Bronson went mad, squawking and flapping and trying to mate with the goose every day. Even Mom bent over laughing. He’d give up after a while and sit on the goose’s head or back, pecking at her every once in a while trying to rouse her, before he went back to the hens. He used to put me in mind of Mom, wattles beneath her chin and hanging from her upper arms, longing for what’s not there.