The Testament of Harold's Wife Read online

  Then Harold came running up toward the house waving to me.

  “Cody got his buck! It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful! I saw him take it down. What a shot.” The storm door slapped behind him. “He needs the truck to get it. Where’d I leave the ropes?” Harold was so happy for Cody, all sweating and flushed and breathing like a trumpeter gone to heaven. I told him when he had it, to bring the truck around underneath Mom’s window so she could see it, too.

  When I heard the truck bumping up the pasture, I went upstairs to get Mom over to her window. When Harold stopped, Cody looked like he tumbled out of the passenger side. He ran for the house, Mom and I looking out the window as he did. Mom stared down. I looked over her shoulder into the bed of the truck. We could see the size of the hole in the buck’s neck, the crimson spread out on the brown. Thin forelegs bent at the joint almost as though he was still running. I could see the heart convulsing on the way it does, maybe forty minutes, even if it’s taken out, but I didn’t know if Mom’s eyes were good enough to catch it. I couldn’t get dumb Annie’s heart going like that if I pumped her chest and blew her into tomorrow.

  I heard Cody on the stairs. “Grandma?” he called, hoarse-voiced, and I didn’t answer because Mom was falling apart, crying and crying on me like a stone dissolving in water, and I held her. I laughed at first; she’d said she wanted to see. I looked down at the old buck as I held her, and then Cody came into the room, his face a red blear, sobbing, “Grandma, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” Mom melted into my arms, heavy, her tears all over me until I could hardly stand up. I looked outside at the old buck again, then at Cody, needing me, but my arms were already full and I felt her thick, ancient body on spindly legs giving out beneath her, and my tears now, all over her. The thready blue pulse in her neck buried into mine, as if all the water were blood and flowing together down to Rush Run where the deer drink.

  6

  I never let myself believe there was a connection, not really, but Mom only lived another nine months after Cody shot the deer and the sadness of it broke their hearts. I fought her the whole time. It was like a long, long losing battle with Resusci Annie. I never could pump enough air and life into Mom, though I’d passed CPR and kept my job and no fifth graders had heart attacks that year anyway. Mom perked up for show when CarolSue came for weeks at a time, but no smiles reached her eyes and we weren’t fooled. It was a natural death and no one’s failure, but then Harold took Cody’s death as his and carried it into a dark secret place. “I should have gone to pick him up, let the goddamn corn rot,” he said once after Cody was gone, and then, when it was pointless, he did let it rot, though he had a buyer needing it. After Harold was gone, too, I had to pay to clear the land so that it could be planted when the seasons came around again. It felt all backward, but I had to have income.

  Back when we first bought the farm, and I mean put ourselves in debt for life, we had a learning curve that was perpendicular. The place had come with some leftover chickens. Yes, alive. Everything we knew about chickens was nothing. What were we thinking?

  I can tell you exactly what we were thinking: Oh! It will be great! We’ll be so happy. It will be good for Harold, get him out of the machine shop where it smells like the artillery he worked on in Vietnam. How hard can it be, after all? It’s good land. You put in seeds and they grow, right? You get a horse for the boy, the horse grazes. Maybe you get a goat or two, because farms are supposed to have them, right? You feed chickens, they lay eggs. Right?

  Well, we were right about some of that. We did end up happy. The rest was a little more complicated. We agreed that the chickens and whatever other animals we’d acquire would be my responsibility, because tending to them could be done after school. This turned out to be a good deal; the job of keeping chickens was the easiest farm chore to learn. Until it started to get really hard, but that was my fault: I named them and I tamed them.

  It didn’t take me long to tell them apart, and see how different their personalities were. The flock of thirteen was of mixed breeds, and believe me, a Rhode Island Red looks nothing like an Ameraucana, for example. They took to eating out of my hand, and letting me pat them. I started letting them out of the coop to roam the yard because I saw how happy it made them. Harold said I was delusional, thinking I knew when chickens were happy. “So, honey, do they show their teeth when they grin if they’re happy?” he said. But I did know.

  I learned how to manage the coop: how to water, what to feed, how much straw bedding was best for the enclosed roost and laying boxes, how they’d always go into the roost on their own, just before dark, and that I didn’t have to worry about that! I learned about predators. The former owner had written a few notes that added up to “There’s nothing to it; feed ’em and collect the eggs.” But I was a teacher. Teachers know how to look things up.

  What to do with all the eggs? At first it wasn’t so bad because by the time we moved, it was November twentieth, and laying had fallen off because there was so much less daylight. I had failed to read up on this, or it just hadn’t registered. We weren’t getting too many more eggs than we could use in order to send our cholesterol counts through the barn roof, and the rest I’d just give to friends when I had an overflow of a couple dozen saved up. In January, the laying stopped completely and I relaxed. Then spring came. By March I was collecting eleven eggs a day, and on April Fools’ Day—an irony not lost on me—it was thirteen. Seems the flock must have been young and productive, according to my hurried catch-up reading. I started taking eggs to school for other teachers. Pretty soon I was hunting for new gift victims.

  Then Harold, wouldn’t you know it was Harold, decided it was time to make some money on this operation, and for that, we’d need more eggs, not fewer. Instead of just getting additional hens, even though yes, it can be touchy to add adults to a flock, wouldn’t you know Harold showed up with Bronson. In a borrowed cat carrier!

  A rooster. Bronson looked darn happy to see his new harem. Flexing his monster thighs, Bronson strode into the run, red comb the biggest in the run, and started bossing the girls around. The hens didn’t waste any time with discussing things or organizing nonviolent protests. Pandemonium.

  “Just women fighting over a man,” Harold said. “Your department. Don’t get hurt,” and remembered something urgent he had to do in the barn, leaving the resident chicken expert to deal with this mess.

  And what a mess it was. When you really have no idea what you’re doing and wade into it because you’re dumb enough to fall in love with land, buy a farm, and think you can just work it out as you go along, well, maybe it’s better not to know ahead.

  I knew that Anna, my gorgeous blossom-white Ameraucana, was a dominant sort, but I’d never quite realized that she was the Queen of the Coop. Until Bronson strutted on in. His breed was Barred Rock, I later learned, and he’d been hand-raised by a farmer Harold had met at the Tractor Supply who didn’t have enough chickens for his two roosters anymore and was smart enough not to want more. So he’d brought in his younger one for the first taker at the Supply. Bronson was a handsome, big, black-and-white boy with an impressive red comb; I could see why Harold had been seduced. Of course, as relatively little as I knew about chickens, I was at least reading and learning. Everything Harold knew, he made up on the spot and it would stand as fact until I caught on.

  Anna had seven of the other hens backing her up. I have never imagined an Unwelcome Wagon of quite such a magnitude. Bronson probably hadn’t been getting much action as the beta rooster where he’d been, because he pretty much took it. After the first day or so, though, Anna was in love and from then on, she and Bronson were an item.

  And that’s how I ended up raising chickens. So we—meaning I—could sell eggs. Of course, what Harold didn’t know was that one rooster can only handle so many chickens. I mean, really. Even those guys out west who believe it’s okay to have a lot of wives stop at some number, don’t they? Harold also didn’t realize that there’s not two cents
of profit in selling eggs if you take good care of your birds, or that Bronson’s arrival meant that we’d need a brood box.

  Harold built the brood box himself. We waited to see what would happen. Soon enough, my Buff Orpington hen named Lulu went broody again, irritable and pecking at my hand to drive me off when I went in to the nesting box to pick up her egg one morning. By the next day she seemed like she was in a trance on the nest, determined and immovable. So I put her in the brood box Harold had constructed in what probably used to be a tool room in the barn. He’d followed instructions: it had a wire floor and straw, a feeder and water, and room for her to move around when she wanted. What would I have done without the library? Lulu settled herself on top of some golf balls I borrowed from the gym teacher at school. The next evening, I snuck out the golf balls, and eased a clutch of nine eggs underneath her, two of them her own.

  How fast new farmers have to learn. Three weeks later, I called in sick to school because I could hear the faint peeps from inside the shells and saw the first cracks in two of them when Lulu briefly got off the clutch to eat.

  “Oh my God, Harold, you can’t miss this,” I insisted. And he did come watch with me, but he didn’t get obsessed the way I did. I couldn’t tear myself away from watching the pointy end of the eggs be slowly punched out, and a damp, scrawny baby emerge in jerky fits and starts, unfolding impossibly bigger than the confines of the shell, resting open-eyed between motions, exhausted by the effort of birthing itself. Six of the nine eggs hatched. I’d candled them all on the tenth day, holding the egg up to a flashlight to check for the shadow of an embryo, but I must have seen a wish in some, or just been lucky on the rest. For most of the first few years on the farm, whatever worked was a matter of dumb luck.

  I tell all this as a way of showing that I experienced awe and death, and then I thought it was a useful combination to know about. Of course, the first time Harold drove the combine was a disaster; there’s an art to raising and lowering the head to avoid rocks while keeping close to the smallest rises of the land. A lot of it is instinct. Or talent, perhaps. There are combine drivers and combine operators. The operators are the ones so good at it that the head of the combine very rarely gets wrecked.

  Harold became an operator. He loved it all, too: the pale green of the undulating land when the crop first broke through the dark earth. It was a life and it was life. And I know how ordinary it all sounds, and it was. The cycles were natural and we lived with them.

  When Mom died, terrible as I felt, there was a certain timeliness to it. The losses then were painful but not enraging. Can you see how and why that life would heal a man who’d been to war? It did. Yes, he did hunt once a year, and I tell you now it wasn’t something I understood—that he’d take himself back to those primal memories—but maybe it was how he contained and limited them.

  In those years, life proceeded on a course that made a certain sense. Even the vagaries of weather. If you accepted the natural world, when erratic heavens heaved spring hail a month before white-sky heat seared the fields, you might worry and grieve, but you were part of it, and it of you.

  You see now, don’t you? We were in that life. We could still laugh, we could cope, we could always go on. Then a drunk driver killed a boy, and six months later to the day, a stricken grandfather waited until nearly five o’clock. He kissed his wife and left her in their yellow kitchen, where she’d just turned on the light, saying he was going to make a pickup. (“What are you picking up?” she might have asked, but didn’t, being distracted by peeling carrots. Did she think at the time—had she ever thought?—how much she would wish she had truly kissed him back right then or said some soft good words to him before he left?) He drove in twilight to the spot on the highway marked with a flat white river rock, where they’d gone every Friday with a small baggie of soil from their own farm (their grandson’s “best place in the world”), and emptied it at the spot where their grandson’s broken body had been thrown by the drunk driver’s truck. The potatoes had been peeled and were roasting, the kitchen gathering fragrance, when her husband parked his pocked Silverado near his intention. She’d made him a meat loaf with bacon on top that night. It had taken effort. He left the keys under the front seat, two baggies of soil on the passenger side his only message to her, and he waited for the moment he felt a deer’s heartbeat somewhere beating with his grandson’s and stepped out in front of the Dwayne County Waste Recycling truck.

  Not one thing natural, not one thing natural about any of it.

  7

  “The Plan, CarolSue. I need The Plan. Ha. Remember how Oma used to say ‘What’s The Plan?’ every day when she stayed with us?” I said.

  “It drove Mom crazy. Used to call Oma ‘Mussolini.’ Not to her face. But close. Remember the time she asked her how the trains were running?”

  “No. Was I there? I bet she meant Hitler.”

  “Would’ve been going too far,” she said, her voice sure. “She knew right when to back off.” Sometimes I think CarolSue remembers Mom better than I do. It scares me. I cannot lose my mind. What if I couldn’t remember Harold? Who would I be?

  I inspected my tea for depth of color, pulled the bag out, squashed it against the lip of the mug. Harold always wanted coffee. “I’m surprised she didn’t do it, though.” As if I, too, could still hear more than isolated snippets of Mom’s words in my memory. “Anyway, I need The Plan. Help me. You’re the one who got the Mussolini gene—you look just like Oma and got her brains, so this is your department.”

  “Do you want my help, or do you plan to continue insulting me while I run up my phone bill?”

  CarolSue’s voice is a consolation and I always keep her on the phone as long as I can, not caring much what she says. Or I hadn’t until then.

  I took my tea to the couch and sat, annoying Marvelle, who had stretched to her full black-and-white length across the two cushions. She gave me the evil eye and I gave her one back, practicing for the day.

  “Yes. I want your help.”

  “You’re not gonna go limp? I mean, you haven’t been exactly clear thinking since it happened.”

  “Well, now who’s insulting who?”

  “That would be whom, teacher. You’re making my point.”

  “I know that. I correct you all the time. You’re just making me mad now. I am clear thinking. Lord, CarolSue. So I miss a pronoun. Have you got Glitter Jesus leaving shiny specks all over your carpet, making you think you’ve got floaters in your eye?”

  “I know, it’s . . .”

  “—No, you don’t. Because you also don’t have Gary’s Ladies’ God Squad members calling you every damn day. It goes like this, ‘Sister Louisa, this is your prayer line calling. It’s all about Jesus! Do you have any questions troubling your heart today?’ ”

  “And I hate to ask what you answer. . . .”

  “I want to scream, ‘What are you talking about? What is all about Jesus? Exactly what? Is that supposed to be some sort of answer? Some sort of comfort? Because I have no idea what you’re talking about and I don’t believe you do, either. Nobody knows.’ But I’ve learned it’s a mistake to say anything. Because when people are convinced of something that’s unknowable, there’s no point. So I just say, ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’ And then they say, ‘Donations for the prayer call line may be sent to 3526 Lords Way, Rossville, Indiana. Have a great day.’ In a very annoying chipper voice. That’s Gary’s address, in case you don’t recognize it.”

  “I recognize it,” CarolSue said quietly. “Stop answering the phone. You can see when it’s me. Just answer when it’s me. Or Gary himself, I guess.”

  “You know that’ll bring him out here. Or he’ll send Gus. Or both.”

  “Yeah. I guess you can start by telling him you don’t care to be God-stalked.” She snorted her laugh. “If worse comes to worst, tell him it’s all made you into an atheist.”

  “That might be true.”

  “Well, that’s okay, too. I don’t think it really m
atters what we believe. Doesn’t change the nature of reality one way or another, does it? Say whatever you need to say.”

  “. . . but maybe he loves me.” I resettled the phone to my ear, closer in the silence. I heard myself sigh as if I were someone else.

  “There’s that,” she said.

  “Like you always say.”

  “He tries so hard to please you.”

  “Not with this cult thing.”

  She sighed. “I know. But he’s completely sincere and he has a good heart. Look what he’s been through, losing his only child.” She didn’t need to say more. From CarolSue, that’s a loaded gun. Raised and pointed. There’s a reason she defends Gary automatically, both of them life members of a terrible exclusive club they were forced to join against their wills.

  My heart beat on for a few minutes. CarolSue waited. She always does. “There’s so much to weep over,” I said. “This morning I put on Harold’s blue plaid shirt, the one that’s maybe ten years old. He wore it the day before he died and it was still in the hamper. Thank God I hadn’t done the laundry.”

  “Gratitude,” CarolSue said. “For one small thing. You could just start from there.”

  “Yes. I know. Okay. I’ll try that.” And I did. I think I gave it an honest try after we hung up. I thought about it. I thought about gratitude. For certain sweet memories. For what remains. I ran it by Marvelle, and then I discussed it with the other girls. I even vacuumed, thinking that might clear the feathers from my mind as well as from the kitchen floor. In the end, though, I ended up calling CarolSue back.

  “It’s not enough. The shirt doesn’t really smell like Harold anymore. I want The Plan.”

  My sister sighed. We both take after Mom with the sighing. But then there was her voice, chipper and strong. “Okay, then. First step is to clarify the objective beyond just saying revenge.”