The Wife Tree (11 page)
Authors: Dorothy Speak
Tags: #Fiction, #Rural, #Sociology, #Social Science, #General
“Can your heart stand this, Conte?”
“I’m fit as a fiddle, Morgan.”
“This is hard work. It could kill you.”
In answer, he swung the axe again, burying it in what was left of the trunk, and I wondered if William, only a few blocks away, might be wakened by the ringing of steel into wood and think, “Ah! Someone is putting an axe to good use,” and feel his own muscles tense in response.
“Stop, Conte,” I said. “No more.”
“I can’t leave this stump here. William wouldn’t approve. He’s such a perfectionist. I’ve got to get it down as close to grade as possible. In the spring we’ll put stump rot on it. Eat the last of her out.”
“You’ve done enough, Conte.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow, then, Morgan, and cut that trunk down.”
“No, just leave it.”
“I’ll at least clear away the branches.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“They’ll freeze. They’ll be trapped in the snow and ice.”
“Not for long. We’ll get a thaw. Leave them just where they are. Your fingers must be frozen. Come in the house, Conte, and I’ll make you a cup of hot chocolate.”
“No, thanks, Morgan. There’s nothing I’d like better, but Vivien will be waiting for me.” Suddenly, he leaned on the axe, spontaneous tears flowing easily down his vein-tracked cheeks. “I’m just so sorry, Morgan,” he blubbered, sobbing like a boy. “I’m so sorry about all those years William and I never spoke to each other. Such a loss. Such a stupid waste.”
But I could feel only scorn for him at that moment, for his weakness and his bewilderment.
Fools we were, the two of us! Two old fools on a windy wintry afternoon, our feet locked in snow.
Dear girls,
…Since your father’s stroke, I’ve for some reason not felt the need for my usual afternoon nap, but the felling of the Wife Tree so fatigued me that I had to lie down for an hour on your father’s bed. When I opened my eyes, there was Goodie Hodnet peering in at me through the window. When she saw me awaken she immediately withdrew. I leapt up and wound the wire arms of my eyeglasses over my ears and went outside looking for her but she’d disappeared. I know this wasn’t a dream or my imagination, because her footprints were everywhere in the deep snow, the size nine impression of the rubber farm boots she still wears. I followed the prints around the perimeter of the house, where they stopped at every window but did not venture up onto the porches, which means she’d no intention of visiting but had come here to spy…
Dear girls,
…I’ve told you that the Man Tree was weeks ago stripped completely bare but in fact there was one last leaf still
clinging stubbornly to a branch. Watching it lift and twist painfully in the wind, unable to let go, I sensed its torment and considered going out with a broom and knocking it down just to put it out of its misery. But this morning when I got up out of bed and looked out, I saw that finally it had released its grip…
Yesterday I could reach neither Muriel nor Anna on the phone, so I was forced to call Goodie.
“Is tomorrow’s bridge game at Anna’s house?” I asked. It was the sixth game since William’s stroke.
“No,” she answered. “I’m afraid the bridge is finished altogether. We’ve dissolved the group.”
“Dissolved?”
“We’ve all grown tired of the game and we’ve decided to quit.”
“But no one asked
me
about this.”
“The majority rules. It was a unanimous decision among the three of us. We didn’t need your vote.”
“What will I do now? Bridge is my only outlet.”
“You could form another group, with other women.”
“But I don’t know any other women.”
“I’m sorry,” Goodie said firmly, “I have to hang up. My books are overdue at the library.”
After lunch, I dressed warmly and left the house, heading south in the snow. After some time, I turned down a road and passed along neat rows of brick bungalows. The houses looked very much alike, but, certain I had the right street, I walked along, peering like a cyclops with my one good eye into all the living-room windows until finally I came to one where the lamps were glowing like yellow moons in the winter afternoon. Sure enough, I saw
Muriel, Goodie, Anna and a strange woman sitting at a table, a bridge game in full swing. Watching them, I imagined the
slap slap slap
of the cards on the table, the sound of which, as recently as yesterday, I’d heard in my future, washing like a soothing tide over all my weeks. I pictured the moody royal family in their ornate and cumbersome robes — the melancholy king, the passive queen, the angry prince — dealt out in their endlessly spinning configurations, so distant from each other, locked in their royal cabinets studded in the corners with the gemlike clubs, spades, diamonds, hearts: the crown jewels.
Picking my way to the centre of Anna’s lawn, I bent over and seized a handful of snow. In my haste to leave the house, I’d forgotten to resurrect my winter gloves. The paralyzing cold instantly froze my fingers and travelled up my wrists. However, I managed to form the snow, which was heavy and wet, perfect for my needs, into a firm ball. I hurled it at Anna’s window, surprising myself by hitting the mark dead-on. Evidently I was less blind than Goodie thought. My reward was a shriek from within the house, loud enough to travel through the double pane.
The women heaved themselves up from the table and hurried to the window, where fragments of the exploded snowball slowly slid down the glass. When they saw me, red-handed as it were and ankle-deep in snow, their jaws dropped open.
I reached for more ammunition and heard a shout of rage go up behind the window. The women pounded angrily on the glass with their fists. When I brought my arm back to hurl the second snowball, they screamed in unison and beat a clumsy retreat. I saw a lamp, one golden planet, go down in the confusion. Moments later, Goodie appeared once more, speaking into a phone, her lips moving rapidly. Reaching into my pocket, I withdrew a paperweight I’d brought
along, knowing in my heart of hearts what I was going to see through Anna’s window. I threw it with all my might. Despite her display of farm-bred courage, Goodie yelped when she saw it coming. It hit the target. At the impact, Goodie lost her grip on the phone and dropped out of sight. A spider’s web formed in the window, its glittering threads shooting like lightning to the four corners.
Just then the front door opened a few inches, Muriel’s face pressed fearfully to the crack.
“What’s come over you, Morgan?” she called, her voice shaky. “Have you completely lost your mind? We’ve called 911. They’re on their way. You’ve done damage. You’ll pay for that window! We’ll see to it you never pick up another bridge hand in this town…”
Her voice followed me as I beat a path down the street, eager to make my getaway before the police arrived with their paddy wagon.
Dear girls,
…When I arrived home today, I saw that up and down the street the neighbourhood children had constructed an army of snowmen. You may not know that the winters here have become very mild. Soon the temperatures will warm and these local heroes, these fragile soldiers, will begin to drip and shrink into the earth and their makers, the little children, like fickle gods, will forget about them. Just as God seems to have forgotten about your father. And I can hardly blame him because I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s grown quite weary of having his ear bent by all the devotions and spirituals and vigils of Morris and his holy-rolling congregation, and refuses to hear another word about William Hazzard…
Dear girls,
…Following a small dispute I had with the bridge ladies, a policeman knocked on my door yesterday afternoon and asked if he might come in and talk to me. I led him into the living room and gestured to your father’s chair, with its pillar of newspapers beside it. He sat down with his cap tucked under his arm, looking very fine in his dark blue suit, and took out a pad and paper. He said he’d received a complaint about a broken picture window. Did I know anything about it?
Yes, I said.
You’re responsible for the breakage, then? he asked. You freely admit it?
Of course, I said.
You don’t look like the kind of person who’d do such a thing.
I’d like to be.
With all due respect, Ma’am, he said, you’re a little elderly to be embarking on a life of crime.
He was short and mildly good-looking, but not enough so to be called handsome. An
almost
sort of person, never quite anything, I suspected. One of those people life washes over and almost forms into something interesting. Almost handsome. Almost successful. Almost happy. Something like your brother, Morris, I thought, who is almost holy.
The policeman asked me why I’d broken the window and I told him the bridge ladies had lied to me.
He said a person couldn’t go around smashing people’s property because of a lie. There was the law to consider.
Then I said, I’ve lived a life of conformity and I’m tired of obeying and being underestimated. I feel nothing but pride for what I’ve done. I think dishonesty is a worse offence than disobedience.
He reflected for a moment and then said, In spite of being a policeman, I’m tempted to break the law myself sometimes because it interferes with — with a person’s — he searched for the right word.
Dignity? I asked and he nodded.
He said it must have taken a lot of courage to confront my friends. Are you widowed? he asked. I told him about your father’s stroke and he said, You must find the house very empty now that you’re alone.
On the contrary, I said, there finally seems to be space here for me. I want to make myself over.
And he said, I’ve thought of that myself but I don’t know how to go about it or where to start.
I said, Maybe some sort of shock is the only way it can happen, something totally beyond your control and outside yourself to put it in motion.
He said he felt he wasn’t very attractive to people, to women especially, and that maybe he was too passive a person, too complacent and dull, someone who wasn’t noticeable. He asked me if I knew a Goodie Hodnet and said that she’d fainted when I threw the paperweight and that she’d struck her head on the corner of a coffee table, temporarily losing consciousness. By the time he arrived on
the scene, she was being slid into an ambulance. He tracked her down at the hospital and found her with a bruised temple and a bandage, under which there were ten stitches. She’d told him she intended to sue me for physical injury and psychological damage and loss of happiness.
Loss of happiness?
Some people do think you can put a dollar figure on it.
I asked him if I was to be arrested and he almost smiled but managed to hold it back and said no, which I must say somewhat disappointed me.
Are you sure you don’t want to take me down to the station? I asked, thinking it would give us more time to talk.
I don’t believe that will be necessary.
Is your work dangerous? I asked, escorting him to the front door.
He said with some disappointment, Not really. This is the sort of thing I do. Investigate minor complaints. It’s a pretty quiet job. There’s a good pension waiting for me, though.
I said, You have something to look forward to, then.
Before leaving, he stopped and looked at all the pictures of you girls in your college gowns and caps, which your father displays so proudly in the front hall, and he said, I was almost married once. He told me he never would have believed he’d reach thirty-four and not have a wife. All he wanted, he said, was a woman’s arms to lie in at night. Someone regular, he said, who cared about him.
I answered that I hated to disillusion him, but marriage was no guarantee of that…
Dear girls,
…When your father finally came home after the war, his face was as pitted as the moon’s crust.
William, I remember saying, I hardly recognize you. What’s happened to your face?
Those sons o’ bitches, Morgan, he explained. We’ve all come back looking like this. Anyone exposed to the explosive mixture in the bombs. It’s a wonder I’m not blind too. The abrasion. The chemicals. But did they do anything about it? Even after we told them? Showed them our skin? Of course not. What would they care? Those sons o’ bitches…
Before I pulled the curtains at bedtime tonight, I looked down into the yard at the destroyed Wife Tree, the sight of its broken flesh, like an amputated limb, making my knees shake. I reached out and touched the window frame to steady myself, thinking of the time my father and brothers came home unexpectedly from the fields. It was a hot August day and I was in the kitchen peeling and pitting peaches for canning, my clothes, my hair stuck to my body, fruit juice running down my wrists to my elbows. I was sixteen, the only girl left at home. All the others had married or moved away to find work. On the edge of the kitchen cot sat my mother, feeding Thomas. Now that he was almost completely paralyzed, she’d withdrawn from the daily tasks of farm life, immersing herself in his care.
At ten in the morning we heard the wagon rumble into the yard and a moment later, my brother Lance lurched into the kitchen,
leaning heavily on my father’s shoulder, a bloody cloth wrapped around his wrist. Another brother, Clive, followed them in. There’d been an accident with the thresher. Lance’s arm had been pulled into the blades, his hand chopped off. Clive, seeing this, had quickly signalled to my father to cut the engine. A search was made in the machine and the hand found in the straw, miraculously whole.
On the wood stove, clouds of vapour, boiling up out of kettles, condensed on the kitchen windows and streamed down like rain. Mason jars, simmering in the sterilizer, jingled musically in their wire racks. The air was sweet with the smell of canning syrup. Clive set the severed hand down on the table, stepped swiftly outside and retched off the back stoop.
The hand lay among the ribbons of peach skin and the heaps of stony fruit pits. We all stared at it as though we’d never seen one before. Meaty and bluish as a steak, it looked foreign and monstrous. Lance saw my mother turn Thomas’s head aside and cover his eyes.
