Lost Nation (56 page)
Authors: Jeffrey Lent
July afternoon, late day with the sun still high. Seated in the deep shade of the porch that ran across the back of the house looking out over the flowerbeds and rose gardens and arbors and terraces, the hammock strung between sturdy English walnuts, the croquet course laid in a flat area of close trimmed lawn, the hoops and flags slight wavering beckonings for the temporarily suspended game. Below there, out of sight was the vegetable garden. There were a pair of men who came weekly to tend the yards and flowers, another who daily not only took care of the carriage barn and horses and equipment but who just in the last two years had been assigned the vegetable garden. When she could no longer do the work, even the simplest of weeding and harvesting. She was dependent now completely on others. Who did not do things quite as she liked but close enough so she held back her sighs. The cost of age. Seventy-four years old. But she was not helpless.
On her lap a wide shallow basket. On the porch floor a deeper basket. Nested in the basket on her lap was a bowl. She was shucking peas. Lifting the fat pods one at a time from the lap basket and splitting the pod with her thumbnail and raking out the peas into the bowl and then with a slight lift that twitched in her lower back each time dropping the empty pod into the basket on the floor. English peas although no one called them that anymore. They had varietal names she could never keep track of. It didn’t matter. The world changed. She still feared the gas lamps that burned clean and radiant at night. She missed her chamber pot. Thought it unnatural to walk in light from her bedroom in her nightgown to the bathroom down the hall. The world was new. She was shucking peas. It was the same old world. Her granddaughter sat in the porch swing watching her.
“Nonnie?” The voice the hope of girlhood.
“Alexandra?” Looking up from the peas, letting her hands rest on the sides of the basket.
“Sammie in the barn had kittens.”
“Did she?”
“She did. Five.” The girl paused and then rushed into it. “I was thinking I’d like one for my own. My very own.”
“Well now. I’d think you’d have to ask your mother.” Knowing where this was going.
“I already did.”
“And?”
“She said barn cats are for the barn. They keep the mice down. She said a kitten in the house would just want to keep going back to the barn and that I should just play with them out there.”
The old woman nodded. She said, “Wouldn’t that be enough?”
“Oh Nonnie. I want one all for my own. It wouldn’t want to go back to the barn. Not if it lived with me. And I’d take care of it, I would.”
“You told your mother that?”
“I did. But she said she wasn’t sure I was old enough. But I am. I am.”
“Umm.” The old woman was silent and the little girl was also, waiting, knowing what hung in the balance of that silence. After a bit the woman prodded her hand in the remaining peas and studied them. Then she looked up at the girl.
She said, “Do you have one picked out special?”
The girl squirmed on the swing and it rocked gently. “I think so. There’s two I like for sure.”
“Well now. It has to be a special one. One that you take into your heart. Maybe you should go play with them and see if either one strikes you that way.”
The girl came off the swing and stood before her grandmother. “And Mama?”
The woman nodded. “She has the last say. But I’ll talk to her.”
The little girl turned and ran down the steps onto the lawn, cutting to run around the side of the house to the gate that opened onto the drive and the barn beyond. Floating back came her voice. “Thank you, Nonnie.”
Out loud, but far from the girl’s hearing the woman said, “A little girl should have a kitten.”
She sat a time still resting. Such labor, those peas. Take me quick was what she thought. Not to linger. Another year at most if she kept failing like this. Her desire such a puny thing before whatever design was assigned to her. She wished she had more courage. The courage to face
boldly whatever it was came her way. To not fear it if it happened to be long slow years of enfeeblement. And then realized she did have that courage. Just because it wasn’t what she wanted didn’t mean she couldn’t turn her face directly into it if that’s what was called for.
She’d ridden five days and nights without stopping except to water the horse and drink herself although it was a terrible job getting off and on the horse and times she’d pause to let the horse crop late-season grass but she refused to stop, to talk with people, to buy food. Something in her back was wrong from when she’d been knocked flat and breathless. It hurt to ride but the idea of stopping was worse and so she did not halt but let the big bay horse find the way and when she did stop for water the horse seemed to know she was his charge and so would stand easy while she fought to remount. At night working their way slowly along roads through the dark with dogs coming from farmyards to howl their passing and days also they went slow as she felt the horse slowly failing beneath her but he’d stopped eating as if his own memory prodded him on. South and westward across Vermont and then crossing into New York State near Whitehall and through the rough farmland little better than where she’d come from and then out into the broad wide valley of the Mohawk, following that river and then south and west again onto the turnpike running alongside the Canal. At dusk on the fifth day in a rainstorm she came into the streets of Geneva with her vision fluttering and the horse also fluttering each step forward and she recalled people stepping away from her as she came on, recalled watching them and wondering what was the matter with them and then she went down. Or the horse went down. Or both together. Later, she liked to think it was both together, that they crumbled at the same time.
Later, when she was awake again, under the care of the man she would marry sooner than she would’ve believed at the time, she asked about the horse and was told it had died. It was with this news that she pushed up in the bed against the pain that encased her as a sheath and told this quiet kind man everything about herself she would ever tell another soul. Which was not all, not quite, but all she would give of herself to another. And he stood listening to her, not insisting she lie back, or rest, or wait, or any of the platitudes he might’ve offered but
instead listened to her telling as if he knew it was the only time he would hear even this much. When she was done she slept three days and when she woke recalled her telling and watched him as he tended her to see if he would raise the questions he might have, that he must have. But he did not. She knew it had not been a fever-dream. And so came the first understanding of the trust that would absorb her as certainly as the pain had so recently. That she would give herself over to. Because it was either that or keep riding and she’d ridden one horse to death and would not do the same to another. At the time she thought There’s an abundance of ways that life settles itself. She had never changed her mind about that.
So. A girl would have a kitten. She could do that much. She rocked in her porch chair a bit, her gaze soft off into the July afternoon. Just late enough so the shadows from the house and trees were beginning to spread out. Still hot but there was a breeze and she was comfortable. She thought I will not flinch, not before anything. She regarded the basket of peas. Half-done. Half to be shelled. Sweet new peas for dinner. She could smell a chicken roasting, the smell lifting from her lovely windows. She held plentitude. But the work before her. She lifted her hands from the basket-edge and studied them. Old spotted hands worn thin like winter stems. The one with the hard purple scar across the palm and insides of its fingers. The other just an old hand. She buried them back into the peas and let them rest there a moment. A job to be done. She took up a pod and split it and raked out the peas into the bowl, discarded the casing and then dipped her hands again for another pod. Her hands found the rhythm. She lifted her eyes from the job. A soft gaze far out beyond the gardens. Her hands did not need her eyes. Her eyes could see anything they wanted to. Her hands knew the work. They went on.
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