You think I’ll weep;
No, I’ll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!
–King Lear, II, iv
The wind is rustling in the trees and shoving them over so that they bow with the weight and lean away from the rude hand of the wind as it pushes against them. It is black out there. And cold. The air has changed over the course of the weeks and now the full sense of autumn and of approaching winter is here in the night with the wind and the cold air.
As the wind pulses and moans outside the frame structure of the house, I think of the night outside as fluid. I conceive of it as a kind of liquid blackness, a spilled bottle of ink, swirling, flowing past the windows and the drawn shades of the living room, of the dining room and the front room which soon will be closed off for yet another season. The chimneys were attended to just the other day. The summer kitchen put right and the flue made ready for the winter stove in the bedroom upstairs, while just below the cookstove in the kitchen is now kept going, morning noon and night, for the sake of all the living quarters on the main floor.
It is time once again to be snug, to draw layers of clothing close about one’s body; to pile the blankets on the bed and to rest there as in a cocoon, a nest or burrow, in the wee hours of the night when the cold plays about the contours of the face, after the fires have died down.
My body is almost ready for the close and comforting place of the bed, but before I turn in, I sit here in semi-darkness, the pools of dark finding the corners of the room and the light beside me driving it from the center. I sit here and write.
Each night it is so. I write the journal or diary really. I chart the passing events, facts of the day. Temperatures, weather, projects contemplated, undertaken, completed, continuing. Henry would say that this writing is just nonsense. He does, however, pay attention to the weather notations, asking me month after month for rainfall amounts of the preceding year or high and low temperatures. He is particularly fond of such information just in the first melting of the Spring and then in the summer especially when the rain gauge has gone dry. And then again in the autumn when the corn has dried enough to be picked.
Just last autumn he was at the corner of the porch and by the door—after dinner it was—and him all bundled up against the wind with his coveralls and his brown zippered half jacket and mud boots. Like the wind tonight, he was rapping at the window and asking me to tell yet one more time what it was that the rain had done last month and last year and when was it that the corn first had been picked the year previous.
I told him, for the book was right here, sitting in one of the vertical file compartments of the roll-top. “You are a week later this year with the corn,” I half shouted through the window and he nodded, satisfied, before moving back out into the weather. It was a wonder that he even heard, with the wind.
Farming is always weather. But, in autumn, especially a wet one, the weather becomes part of the brunt of what one must face, so that there is an admixture of things: work to be done, weather to be faced. I can still see him then, striding across the yard towards the barn before turning down the lane. Then, even in the wind, there’s the sound of the picker coming to life, that air-cooled Wisconsin engine that Henry is always preening and fussin’ over. It always comes to life, rarely fails to start. And then, just a bit later, the sliding of the barn door and the jingle of the traces coming across on the wind, even on blustery days, as the team comes out away from the lunch pail and the hay mow for an afternoon of work. He walks them over the tongue of the forecart even though I can’t see down the lane from the kitchen. But I know it’s happening. It’s part of the rhythm of this place at this point in the year. And then, when the hitching’s done, they come out of the lane, striding powerfully, pulling the one row corn picker into the edge of the field closest to the barn.
Burdell comes over with his team on the gravity box, as if on cue, and the two of them start down the row, the picker spitting, spilling the ears of corn into the box as Burdell walks his patient team up close to the clacking monster of the picker and keeps them at it. I don’t know. Some folks like the patterns in the quilt and can look into the colors and the shapes with real abandon. I work on quilts and love choosing the colors and combining the patterns in a circle of others on a cold winter’s day. But the abandon part, the immersing of my self in a scene —well, that’s always been the meaning of the work I see outside the shell of this house.
I sit with the accounting books or what-have-you, looking out the window on an afternoon like this, and there it is: there is the place that holds me, the hard unyielding process of working land—I cannot tell you what it means.
That was the afternoon that Henry and Burdell started down the last field of corn, I think, for this whole year. They had worked long and hard at the Cathman’s and then gradually had made their way through the home fields here until the final one was left. The wind then was shrieking like the wind in the blackness now. It would come and go in waves and I can still feel the slight nudge of the cold as it worked its way in under the door where the weather stripping had worn away. It would come to my ankles on days like these, in late October. And my toes would feel it, too.
I looked up, from time to time, from the books I was keeping, and I could see them out in the brunt of the weather, working the teams back towards the barn. I could see the growing pile of the corn in the center of the gravity box, where it would mound up. I could see the chaff of the corn flying out and away from the two of them in the wind, and the progress they was making was good. I remember that day, the two of them in a rhythm that they carved out together in the wind. I remember the rusted orange color of the gravity box and the gold of the corn and the moist breathing of the horses as they rested just by the barn before making another round.
They worked until four or so in the afternoon and then it was time to think about milking. Our few shorthorns that Henry saved out from the big sale of the preceding year were clustered near the silo and out of the wind, waiting. Burdell had many more that no doubt would be right at the door of his barn and so he was off to tend them. Good progress had been made. There were only, what, four or so passes to make before the field would be picked and the harvest completed. Then I suppose Henry would be about the fence for a day or so, mending, before the cows would be turned in to make what they could of the corn stalks. The final chapter, final actions, in the growing season now drawing to a close.
I will never forget that day. Especially on a night like this, the memory cannot be denied. It comes to me across the twelve months with a force greater than the wind, greater than the sounds of the black liquid pulsing in the night beyond the drawn shade. I remember and remember.
Henry came in, all ruddy faced and bone tired, from the harvest and the feeding and the milking. He sat down to my pot roast sliced beef supper sandwiches and coffee and mashed potatoes, but passed on dessert which was unusual for Henry. I should and did not mind, knowing the way a long hard afternoon can sometimes take you beyond the point of even blackberry cobbler.
He went upstairs for a warm bath. And I could hear the water drawing from through the kitchen grate from below, the sounds of it spilling into the big white claw-footed tub.
Oh, and the time they had getting that tub up the back stairs! Three of them it was. Wilbur and Henry, of course, and little Jimmy MacDonald, almost down flat on his back, pushing on the cast iron rim of that heavy, leaden, son of a bitchin’ tub as he was speaking to it, his voice a drawn file, cutting the air as he struggled.
“Heave on it,” Henry said. From where I sat, I could see the pliers in his back pocket and the baling wire that he still had in there. I could see that and the slight swaying of his hips as he spoke.
“You mean, piss-poor, water-holding nothin’; you cast-iron whale; you son of a bitch,” came Jimmy’s voice again fro
m beyond Henry’s quaking legs. And then Wilbur’s grunt from up top added to it. I heard that and this sliding sound as the tub itself spoke.
They moved it past that fateful crook in the narrow stairwell, and got it straightened away for the final ascent, and up it went. Henry came down all smiles and I saw it for myself later, with his help— after supper that evening— with the first of the water spilling into it, warm water too, drawn up from that new hot water heater that he had just plumbed over from the hot water reservoir of the cookstove.
Water, it seems is eternal. I believe it. And its sound: always, there is the sound, that day and Henry’s day and the water always there, making the same sound. It is always the water; always the water spilling into the tub. That is the sound, beyond the wind that I am always hearing.
Even in the house, when the work is over, there is a rhythm to things. Where does it come from? Outside in or the other way around? Always I am hearing as Henry for yet another time is drawin’ the water. Unbuttoning his undershirt and long johns, he would be, standing by the side of the claw-footed iron monster, at the end of that long day. Is his head down? Does he have one foot over, sitting on the rim.? Sometimes I see him reaching down into the warm and the soft of the water with his long arms and his worn, cupped hands, callused and hard, stiff from work.
I am sitting below, just as I am now. Sitting at the desk of an evening, with the records to keep, bills to pay, checks scattered around the surface of the desk and the edges of envelopes staring at me from one of the pigeonholes. I am writing away, listening to the water, when the sound of the water changes.
Oh, the change is subtle. It is not the sound of the water, I suppose, but an additional sound, a layering of water upon water: the rushing of water spilling into the tub and, beyond it, the singular sound of dripping.
I have been attuned to dripping most of my life, from earliest times on. Daddy would wander the house in the rain, some of the places we lived. Always there was patchin’ that didn’t hold, places where the water would come in from the black night so that the wind and water combined to assault the roof. And then, in the blackest of the blackest night, I would be sitting up—a child of four or six or twelve—roused not by the wind or the drumming of the rain or the thick black paint of the night itself. No, I would be roused, fully awake, by the singular sound. The one sound of one drop finding its way in, in and down. Pat. Pat, pat. Pat, pat, pat, pat-pat. It would sound. One sound for each drop. And I would lie awake, fully awake, counting.
I looked up then from my check writing, fully awake. Fully awake and roused. And I knew that it was wrong. Something was wrong above me. I knew it was wrong from the moment I heard my own voice, thin and frail, and realized I was counting.
I can see around corners, you might say. At least when Henry is outside, working. Experience and rhythm and habit of years of his working have given me insight into where he is and what he is doing even when there is no sight. From my pivot point, at the desk, I am used to travel far and wide about our place. But at the sound of the water I lost my vision. I lost my ability to travel. As the water poured into the tub and the drip of each droplet made its distinctive sound, I could not imagine what Henry looked like or where he was, exactly. I could not see him slumped under the water even when I called, as into the wind, lifting my voice to make it carry, and heard nothing. I could not see Henry eased down onto the floor, his head against the rough curved edge of the cast-iron tub, his long arms still in the water brimming the tub. Even the pat-pat of the water itself coming through the floor boards and the tongue-and-groove of the pine ceiling that Henry had nailed up just five years ago, replacing the ugly mottled plaster, could not get me to see.
Not seeing, not hearing proper, there was this need to move. I pulled the wheelchair with its long, ugly back and spinning front wheels over to my side, by the roll-top. I locked the main wheels and took the plank that Henry had made special for me to get around over the years, and I eased out, working my body with the strength of my arms, as the water came down. I slumped into the chair and released the wheels just a little too soon so that the chair spun a bit. I sat up and moved towards the stairs.
The sound of the water now was again different. The droplets were mounting, the numbers increasing. I could see rows of droplets on the pine ceiling and now, for the first time, there was water on the stairs. It made a sheen like rain on a freshly oiled road and I imagined it was slick as I thrust myself towards it. At the base of the stairs, I called again. Perhaps this was the fourth or fifth call, I do not know. I could not hear my voice, the way it was. I was inside myself with fear. But now, at the base of the stairs, I came upon the great problem: there was no way to go up.
“Henry, you must carry me,” was what I wanted to say. And that is how I know I called again, for even with the hearing of my voice inside myself, I could hear the same cadence of the way I would call for him, to be lifted up to the bed.
I called and heard the sound of the water. I wanted to launch myself onto the hard wood of the stairs, but something in my mind made me see myself, perhaps half-way up, in the crook of the stairs, not being able to claw, press myself up. “You son of a bitch. You piss-poor son of a bitch” was what little Jimmy would say, flat on his back, and now I was there, too, in my mind, fearful of sliding down, with just the weight of my own body threatening to drive me down into the sharp angular corner where the steep, narrow stairs turned and where I could see myself, all in a pile. And so I refrained. I unlocked the wheels where I had made them fast, facing the stairs. I turned, thrust myself back through the raining water and towards the phone.
Why had I not thought of it at once? What was he like, now, above me? That was why? That was the fear both above me and inside of me at once. So I rang onto the party line, three quick and two long, and Elise Burdell took the phone, her voice kind of dreamy it seemed.
“Elise?”
“Well, good evening, Ruth. How are you this night?”
“Elise, Henry is upstairs in the house, and the water is running and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what has happened?”
“Oh, Ruth, just a minute. Burdell… Burdell! Here now…” There was a muffling of the phone but her voice nonetheless came through clear:
“Henry’s in trouble, collapsed upstairs is what I think. Go quick!” And then her voice towards me again:
“Oh, Ruthie, Burdell’s already left, he’s on his way.”
I could see Burdell already inside of the old Ford pickup, pulling the choke out and pumping the gas. I could see this thing, and hear the pop of the motor coming to life, but upstairs was different. Upstairs was veiled by the water running now across the floor, forming a slick, clear, evil pool—a pool of limpid evil is what I would be callin’ it, even if Henry would laugh at such words, such notions. He would be standing, just where the kitchen pocket door made its entrance into the living room, his long lean left leg bent and his elbow crooked, holding himself in this strange way near the Western Horseman and the Field & Stream magazines of the built in bookcase. That’s where he would be but for this water. Evil, wrong pools.
I looked at it, and moved my wheel-chair through it and towards the slick sheen of more water on the stairs, each step brimming in a mockery of what surely must be above.
Trust and obey, for there’s no other way! Miss Pauline leading the Sunday School girls to the front of the Baptist church during the last of opening exercises, the people singing the last stanza. And I see Deacon Simms bringing the water up. The glass of water for the preacher. Where was I then? How old? Four or six or twelve? Remembering the time when the old man tripped and almost spilled…
At the first step I turned sharply yet careful to the left and into the pantry. There, behind the door as I closed it, were the two round handles of the water supply where I cut them off first from the attic cistern and second from the hot water heater where it was bound upstairs. I tur
ned hard, until the handles tightened, and heard a strange silence. The long, swan-like spigot could make no more noise. Only the patter and the whisper of the water finding the stairs, finding the cracks, finding the kitchen floor, finding the inside of the interior wall where I now sat, sweating, as I heard the water, falling inside the studs, just to the right of my right shoulder. And now as well the sound of rain outside on the window pane.
For me, there was no wind, then. No black paint outside anymore. No rapping sounds or sounds of the wind in the trees. There was just the water, unlayered, making the sound of drops falling helplessly down.
Should I cry? Pray? Perhaps another verse to sing? Perhaps make a fist and smash the mirror by the wash-stand in the back-room of the pantry. There was the sour smell of sweat here. Sweat of Henry at wash-up time, still in the wash cloth and the towel hanging on the back of the door. Smell of Lava soap. And there was me, flushed and contorted, my eyes blank, my lips drawn back into a grin as I saw myself in the mirror, my hand on the door pushing it away, pushing me away, forever, again and again, as I moved past me and into the kitchen and towards Burdell standing under the porch light, the screen door ajar, trying the handle.
The lights of his pickup were still on and I could see the rain, sheets of rain, in the headlights and see it, too, on the shoulders of his blue denim shirt where it made a dark stain as he came in.
“Upstairs!” It was all I could get out, but it didn’t matter.
Burdell came by fast, his feet making mud tracks on the steps as he took them two at a time. One, two, three strides across the second floor. I could hear him, breathing, above my head.
“Burdell?”
“No. No Henry, Henry? Henry do you hear me?”
The sound of a heavy weight above me. Henry speaking, I suppose. And now I could see him. I could see him, not in the tub, his face purpled, his arms floating out like limbs in the stock tank after the storm. No. I did not have to see him this way. I could see him down near the claws of the tub. Burdell would have a towel over him and perhaps one under the head. I looked for his eyes, but they were not there.
“Henry?”
“Not yet, Ruth. In just a minute?”
“Henry!” And the voice I heard, my voice, was no longer wrapped in fear. It was tinged with anger, urgent seething anger. What had he done with himself? Where had he gone? For I knew. Burdell would tell me a few moments later, after he had clambered down those damn stairs and over to the phone. He rang the operator and called the doc. And then he told me that what I already knew.
“Henry’s had a stroke. He’s breathin’ sure. But he can’t move just now. His eyes don’t look right. His foot has a quakin’ to it, Ruthie.”
“Lord, have mercy!”
“Yes. Something’s happened to him, Ruthie, deep inside.”
“Oh, I see…”