Our Souls at Night (7 page)

I wanted to be a poet. I don’t think anyone but Diane ever knew that. I was studying literature in college and getting a teaching certificate at the same time. But I was crazy about poetry. All the standard poets that we read then. T. S. Eliot. Dylan Thomas. e.e. cummings. Robert Frost. Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson. Individual poems by Housman and Matthew Arnold and John Donne. Shakespeare’s sonnets. Browning. Tennyson. I memorized some of them.

Can you still recall them?

He said the opening lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” A few lines of “Fern Hill” and some of the lines of “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.”

What happened?

You mean why didn’t I pursue it?

You still seem interested.

I am. But not like I was. I started teaching and
Holly came along and I got busy. I went to work in the summers painting houses. We needed the money. Or at least I thought we did.

I remember you painting houses. With a couple of other teachers.

Diane didn’t want to work and I agreed it was important for Holly to have someone at home with her. So I wrote a little in the evening and a little maybe on the weekends. I got a couple of poems accepted by journals and quarterlies, but most of what I sent out got rejected, got returned without a note. If I ever got anything from an editor, some word or phrase, I took that as encouragement and practically lived on it for months. It’s not surprising looking back on it. They were awful little things. Imitative. Unnecessarily complicated. I remember one poem had a line in it using the phrase iris blue, which is all right, but I divided the word up into the i of ris blue.

What does it mean?

Who knows. Or cares. I showed that particular poem, one of the early ones, to one of my professors at college and he looked at it and looked at me for a while and said, Well, that’s interesting. Keep working. Oh, it was pitiful stuff really.

But you might have gotten better if you’d kept at it.

Maybe. But it didn’t work out. I just didn’t have it in me. And Diane didn’t like it.

Why not?

I don’t know. Maybe it was a threat to her of some kind. I think she was jealous of my feeling about it and about the time it took me away to myself, being isolated and private.

She didn’t support your wanting to do this.

She didn’t have anything she wanted to do herself. Except take care of Holly. And later she was confirmed in her feelings and thoughts by the group of women she met with, like I told you.

Well, I wish you’d take it up again.

I think it’s past my time for that. I’ve got you now. I feel pretty passionate about us, you know. But what about you? You’ve never said what you wanted to do.

I wanted to be a teacher. I started a course in college in Lincoln but I got pregnant with Connie and quit school. Later on I took a short course in bookkeeping so I could help Carl, and as I said I became his part-time receptionist and did the books. When Gene started school I took a clerk’s job in the Holt town offices, as you know, and stayed there a long time. Too long.

Why didn’t you ever go back to teaching?

I think I was never really deeply involved or committed to that. It was just what women did. Teaching or nursing. Not everybody finds out what they really want, like you did.

But I didn’t do it either. I only played at it.

But you liked teaching literature in the high school.

I liked it all right. But it wasn’t the same. I was only teaching poetry a few weeks a year and not writing it. The kids didn’t really give a damn about it. A few of them did. But not most of them. They probably look back on those years and hours as old man Waters going off again. Talking shit about some guy a hundred years ago who wrote some lines about a dead young athlete being carried through town on a chair, which they couldn’t relate to, or imagine such a thing being done to themselves. I made them memorize a poem. The boys chose the shortest poem possible. When they got up to recite they were petrified, just nervous as hell. I almost felt sorry for them.

Here’s a kid that’s spent his first fifteen years learning how to drive a tractor and drill wheat and grease a combine and now somebody arbitrarily makes him say a poem out loud in front of other boys and girls who’ve been raising wheat and driving tractors and feeding hogs and now to pass and get out of English class he’s
got to recite “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now” and actually say the word loveliest out loud.

She laughed. But that was good for them.

I thought so. I doubt they thought it was. I doubt they even do now, looking back on it, except to have a kind of communal pride in having taken old man Waters’s course and gotten through it, thinking it was a kind of rite of passage.

You’re too hard on yourself.

I did have one very bright country girl who memorized the Prufrock poem word perfectly. She didn’t have to do that. It was on her own, her own volition and decision. I only asked them to memorize something short. I actually got tears in my eyes when she said all those lines so well. She seemed to have a pretty good idea what the poem meant too.

Outside the dark bedroom suddenly the wind came up and blew hard in the open window whipping the curtains back and forth. Then it started to rain.

I better close the window.

Not completely. Doesn’t it smell lovely. The loveliest now.

Exactly.

He rose and pulled the window down, leaving it partially open, and got back in bed.

They lay next to each other and listened to the rain.

So life hasn’t turned out right for either of us, not the way we expected, he said.

Except it feels good now, at this moment.

Better than I have reason to believe I deserve, he said.

Oh, you deserve to be happy. Don’t you believe that?

I believe that’s how it’s turned out, for these last couple of months. For whatever reason.

You’re still skeptical about how long this will last.

Everything changes. He got up again from bed.

Where are you going now?

I’m going to check on them. They might’ve gotten scared by the wind and rain.

You might scare them going in there.

I’ll be quiet.

Come back then.

The boy was asleep. The dog lifted her head from the pillow, looked up at Louis and lay back again.

In Addie’s bedroom Louis put his hand out the window and caught the rain dripping off the eaves and came to bed and touched his wet hand on Addie’s soft cheek.

The next time they checked in the shed behind Louis’s house the mice had grown and now had dark hair and their eyes were open. They skittered around when Louis raised the lid. The mother wasn’t there. They watched the little bright black-eyed mice crawl over one another and sniffle and hide. They’re about ready to leave the nest, Louis said.

What will they do?

They’ll do what their mother shows them. They’ll go out and look for food and make nests themselves and connect up with some other mice and have babies.

Won’t we see them again?

Probably not. We might see them in the garden or out around the garage and beside the walls and the base of the shed. We’ll have to watch.

Why did the mother run away? She left them alone.

She’s afraid of us. She’s more afraid of us than of leaving her children.

But we won’t hurt them, will we?

No. I don’t want mice in the house but I don’t mind them out here. Unless they get under the hood of the car and chew through the wiring.

How can they do that?

Mice can get in almost anywhere.

Addie said, You don’t need to do that.

Yes I do, Ruth said. I want to repay the favor. For taking me out.

What can I bring, then?

Just bring yourself. And Louis and Jamie.

In the afternoon they went to the back door of Ruth’s old house and she came out across the porch in her slippers and house dress and apron, her face and thin cheeks red from cooking. She let them in. Bonny was whining at the bottom of the steps. Oh, let her come in too. She won’t be any trouble. The dog came scrambling up into the house. They followed and went into the kitchen, where the table was already set. It was very warm because of the oven. I was going to have us eat in here. But it’s too hot now.

Louis stood in the doorway. You want to move to the dining room?

That’s so much bother.

We’ll just move everything in there. What if I open some of these windows.

Well, I doubt they’ll even open. You can try.

He pried at the bay windows with a screwdriver and got two to open.

Oh. You did it. Well, men are good for some things. I’ll say that much.

Damn right, Louis said.

They ate a supper of macaroni and cheese casserole and iceberg lettuce with Thousand Island dressing and canned green beans and bread and butter and iced tea poured from an old heavy glass pitcher and there was Neapolitan ice cream for dessert. The dog lay at Jamie’s feet.

After supper Ruth took Jamie into the living room and showed him the pictures on the walls and on the bureau while Addie and Louis cleared the dishes and washed up.

Look here, she said. Where do you think this is?

I don’t know.

This is Holt. This is how Holt looked back in the 1920s. Ninety years ago.

The boy looked up at her old thin wrinkled face and looked at the picture.

Oh, I wasn’t alive then. I’m not that old. My mother told me about it. Trees on Main Street. All along the street. An old-fashioned-looking place, orderly and quiet. Wasn’t it pretty. Nice to walk there and shop. Then they got electricity. And light poles and street lights on Main Street. Then one night they cut all the trees down after people in town had gone to bed. The next morning people saw what the town council had done. They said the trees blocked the light from the street lamps. People were mad as hell about it, mad enough to spit. My mother was still mad about it for years afterward. She’s the one who told me about this piece of town history and kept this old picture. Men, she used to say. She never forgave my father. He was on the town council.

Wait now, Louis said. I thought you said we were good for some things.

No. You’re still on probation. But this boy can be different, she said. I have hopes for him. She took Jamie’s face in her hands. You’re a good boy. Don’t you forget that. Don’t you let anyone make you think otherwise. You won’t, will you.

No.

That’s right. She let him go.

Thank you for supper, he said.

Well, honey, you’re very welcome.

They started home then. Addie, Louis, Jamie and the dog went out into the cool summer dark. It’s a beautiful night, Addie called.

Yes, Ruth called. Yes. Goodnight.

One morning while it was still cool they took Bonny out in the country to let her run. They put the protective tube on her foot and drove out to the west of town onto a straight gravel road. There were sunflowers in the barrow ditch and short bluestem and soapweed. Jamie let the dog out of the back seat and took the leash off. She looked up at him, waiting.

Go on, Louis said. You can run now. Take off. He clapped his hands.

She jumped up and began running down the road and in and out of the barrow ditches, her protected paw making a soft thud in the hard road as she ran. The boy ran out after her. Addie and Louis followed, walking slowly, watching them. No cars came on the road while they were there.

This has been a good idea, Addie said, getting this dog.

He does seem happier.

That and he’s made an adjustment to being here with us. Who knows if it’ll continue when he goes home.

They came running back. The boy was red-faced and panting.

She can run all right with her hurt paw, he said. Did you see her?

The dog looked at the boy and they ran off again. It was getting hot now. Middle of July. The sky unclouded and the wheat in the fields alongside the road already cut, the stubble all neat and sheared off square, in the next field the corn running in straight dark green rows. A bright hot summer’s day.

In late July Ruth went to the bank on Main Street with another old lady who was still permitted to drive, and standing at the teller counter she took up the money she was withdrawing from savings, folded it into her purse and zipped the pocket and turned to leave, and turned halfway around toward the door and fell down and died. Just collapsed in a final frail bundle on the tiled bank floor and stopped breathing. They said afterward that she had probably stopped breathing before she even hit the floor. The other woman covered her mouth with her hand and began to cry. They called for the ambulance but she was long past saving. They didn’t bother taking her to the hospital. The coroner came to certify her death and they took her to the funeral home in town on Birch Street. Her body was cremated and there was a small funeral at the Presbyterian church two days later. Not many of her friends
were still alive, old ladies, a few old men, who came limping and shuffling into the church and sat down in the pews and some of them leaned and nodded over with their chins rested on their thin chests and slept a while and then woke when the hymn started.

Addie and Louis sat down in front. She had arranged the funeral and told the minister about Ruth. He hadn’t known her at all. She had stopped going to any church because of her feelings about orthodoxy and the childish ways in which churches talked and thought about God.

Afterward the people attending the funeral all went back to their silent homes and Addie took the enameled urn of her ashes to her house. It turned out the old lady had no immediate family, except for a distant niece in South Dakota who became her inheritor. The niece came to Holt in the next week and met with the lawyer and the realtor, and the house that Ruth had lived in for decades was sold in a month to a retired man and his wife from out of state. The niece didn’t want the urn. Do you want it? she said.

Addie took it and at two in the morning in the dark she and Louis spread her ashes in the backyard behind Ruth’s house.

Now it wasn’t the same as it was when Ruth was there and they could all go out for a night to the drive-in
café and afterward to a softball game. They decided Jamie didn’t have to know about all of this. They told him she had gone to live somewhere else. They decided that wasn’t entirely a lie.

She was a good person, wasn’t she, Louis said. I admired her.

I miss her already, Addie said. What’s going to happen to us—to you and me?