“Here are two wives,” Karen said. “His first one there. I never knew her, of course. She was Ed’s mother—Ed’s and Cissy’s. My mother’s stone is better.” They stopped before a fine stone, a hard, polished white, exactly like the sky. ELIZABETH ANN HERZ. Jack watched Karen as she stared at the stone. If he was afraid she might drop to her knees at any second he gave no indication, but smoked his cigarette in silence. “She was supposed to look like me,” Karen said. Sometimes she had prayed, alone by herself here, but today it did not cross her mind. She was fascinated instead by the coldness of the day, the cold, hard stone with its chipped letters, the brittle weeds, the cemetery itself, as they compared to her own youth: what magnificent life she possessed, what health, what feeling! She turned to Jack in wonder and despair, and she could not help but think that in just such a way had her mother turned to Herz—turned to the big, smiling, strong man, the handsome man with the proud, selfish look. In just such a way had she given herself to him—
But Karen could not do it. The moment passed. She smiled in embarrassment at Jack’s strange look and went on, looking back to the graves, “The other wives aren’t here. Their people wanted them back. One of them has her own tomb, over in Tintern; we used to go visit it sometimes and take flowers. We haven’t for a while, though. . . . I can’t remember whose mother she is. Celine’s, I guess.” Jack followed along beside her. “That space is for him, for when he dies. He goes in the middle, under the oak. I used to lie down there, flat on my back; I don’t know why. I used to cry about it. Then my grave will be—”
“What?” said Jack.
“My grave,” said Karen. “It will be there—somewhere around there. I used to want an angel like my grandmother, but I don’t any more. Birds go on them—you know—and the freeze shifts them around.”
“Why do you think you’ll be here?” Jack said. “What makes you think such things?”
“What makes me—What else am I to think?” Karen said. She turned to look at him. They faced each other, strangers, and their voices had turned a little sharp, perhaps from the cold air. “This is what I want.”
“It’s what you want?” said Jack. His eyes narrowed. “Staying here? Being buried up here? It’s what you want?” She saw him swallow. “Not being buried with your husband? What about that?”
“Husband!” Karen whispered. “But I won’t have one.”
“What do you mean? Of course you’ll have one.”
“No. I won’t.”
“Of course you will,” Jack said angrily. “What the hell is wrong with you? Of course you’ll be married—all girls are—you’re a beautiful girl, a—”
“I won’t,” Karen said. “I won’t marry.”
Jack stared at her. He finished his cigarette and let it fall to the ground.
Karen went ahead of him to descend the path. Below them coarse, thinning sheets of snow still lay on the ground. The brown weeds, like spikes, looked especially sharp against the snow. The farm buildings looked big and neat, and the house itself, on the highest hill, faced them with its high old-fashioned windows shot with reflected sunlight. A three-story house, made of stone: playing in the fields they had pretended it was their castle. Giant oak trees leaned over it, lightning rods protected it.
Far to the left there were cornstalks bunched together in a field in crooked rows behind the snow fence. Winding in and out of the cornstalks were strips of ice. Just beyond that was the thicket that grew by the creek, and in that was old Rule’s shanty—hidden from sight. No smoke even eased up from it, as smoke did from Herz’s big chimney; and Karen was struck again by the queer thought that it would be pleasant to die there, lulled by the rushing of the creek, soothed by the chill sunlight. Then over here, here to the cemetery: Herz would put him along the side, probably, where some of the hired men were buried—homeless men, churchless men, men without faces. If only it were already done! Karen felt that then she might breathe again.
At the bottom of the hill Jack’s unsteady voice showed that something had happened to upset him. He talked of going home now, of thanking her father for dinner, of . . . “You meant that, didn’t you?” he said. Karen thought he was about to take hold of her. “About not wanting to marry. You meant it. You mean it. It’s in your head that way—he’s stuffed it in you!”
Karen stared. “What do you mean?”
“He’s got you to promise something,” Jack said softly, as if they were conspiring. “To take care of him in his old age—something like that. Sure. And you want to do it.”
They looked at each other. They stood at the edge of the circling driveway, not far from Jack’s car. “You don’t want me to come back then,” he said. His tongue flicked out to moisten his lips. “You want to forget about it. Do I understand you?”
“There’s nothing to forget about,” Karen said.
She spoke quietly, yet she was aware of the weight of her words and, though she did not watch Jack, she sensed the stabbing chillness that for a moment left him speechless and vulnerable; but there was nothing for her to do except wait.
When he did finally speak it was a disappointment—the same mock-robust, loose manner he had hid behind at the tavern. “Sure. All right. I’ll see you then—you and your father. I’ll see you around. Around the cattle judging.”
“Good-by,” said Karen.
She turned to climb the steps. Jack must have watched her for a moment, then he said, in the same way, “I always knew you felt like that. Really. I always knew it. You never fooled me, or tried to—you told the truth. You always told the gahdam truth, looking me in the middle of the forehead! Little girl! The old women in my family could tell it too and told me to forget about you. They said you were poison for me. Poison—you would ruin me—you would drive me crazy—And for what? For what? What are you but a child after all, a kid, a little kid! There’s nothing to you! Some people even say you’re queer in the head—and my brother doesn’t even think you’re pretty. He likes them fixed up and—He likes them women. What do you know about that? You don’t know anything—anything—you’re as cold as all your family up in the graveyard, might as well be dead! Might as well be dead right now!”
Karen ran the last few steps to the house. What emotion she felt was only relief, slight shame—shame for Jack himself, when he thought over his words. He had shown her now why he was not suited for her—why he did not deserve her; a few hours later, by himself, he would understand the nature of his confession.
But deep inside her brain, like a sliver of glass suddenly uncovered in the dark, secret earth, was the knowledge that much of what Jack had said was true.
THAT NIGHT KAREN’S FATHER READ to them from the Bible. He sat in his chair beside the fireplace. The old fireplace, begrimed by time, was consumed by a great fire: logs, kindling, embers, blasts of flame. The shifting fire put his face into an uneasy arrangement of shadow and glowing flesh as he read. He had read to his family every Sunday night from the Bible; Karen remembered when the room had been filled with children. Now only Karen and Celine remained, but he spoke as if to an entire room, his voice expansive and dramatic, poking into corners, forcing its way into shadowy cracks. He read to them from Genesis, the story of Abraham and Isaac:
“‘He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”’”
Karen listened intently, watching her father’s face. Beside her Celine sat in a daze from the hot fire, dreaming, perhaps, or with her mind blank. Karen had heard this story many times before—her father’s words put her in mind of other evenings, the big drafty room hushed with children, Karen’s own mother over there in the chair in which she had sat to sew. But Karen resisted dreaming and listened to the words. They evoked in her mind visions of faceless people, humanity bound by stories, by parables. What strange dignity to fulfill one’s destiny in that way—forever bound by the inhuman plot of a story, manipulat
ed by God Himself! It was a queer thought and Karen did not really understand it, though she felt very clearly the power of its attraction. . . . Her father’s voice was swelling with confidence as he neared the conclusion of the story; at the same words his tone always changed, as if there were a pencil mark in the text. “‘Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him upon the altar, upon the wood.’” This was pronounced evenly, steadily, as if Karen’s father were reciting the ingredients in a recipe. “‘Then Abraham put forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son . . .’”
Karen stared at her father’s face. For the instant he was transformed by his reading, by the story of these ancient people. Karen read their anguish in her father’s face, in his thoughtful eyes, the aging lines about his mouth; what did this transformation mean? Or did she imagine it? Had it carried her along with him, absolved of the trivial vulgarities of her life—of Jack’s demanding love, of Rule’s sickness, of Shar himself who somehow threatened them? The thought of an absolution of this life appealed to Karen strangely, eerily, so captivating her mind that she hardly heard the rest of the story. Really she did not hear it.
Her father closed the dirty Bible. Karen did not look up at him for fear of what she might see: an aging man, a man already old, forced to consider eternity by pains about his heart, forced to consider it alone; no one could help him. Karen herself could not help him. But the magic of the Biblical story haunted the chilly air about them, and the hot air about the fireplace, and suggested comfort—mysterious comfort.
Celine yawned and spoke of bed. And so that Sunday ended.
4
Afterward, when Karen tried to remember that night—her father’s reading of the Bible, the fireplace alive with flame, Celine half dozing beside her—it was really so she might remember herself. Summoning those images back might give her the power to see herself as she had been: Karen at seventeen, sitting forward, staring at her father’s face, her features belying her childlike fascination, her innocence.
The next morning dawned cold and gray, like all mornings in early spring. Wanting company as well as warmth, Karen went down into the kitchen where her father and the hired men sat at breakfast. The hired men were a good lot generally: most of them over forty, with vague, shifting pasts, strong arms, weathered faces, fatherly looks for her. It had come as a surprise to Karen when she had discovered years ago that other families did not have so many men around all the time; she had felt it somehow vulgar of them, and ignorant of their children to talk about it. Her father greeted her with surprise, since she rarely got up so early and rarely came into the kitchen when it was crowded. “She’s got up to help us work, it looks like,” he said. “Come here, Karen. Let’s see if she’s old enough to have coffee.”
Karen laughed and waved him away. She did not drink coffee, she had never learned. No, she said, shaking her head, she had never learned. The kitchen was warm and pleasant and Karen did not think that the men had to change their conversation for her; they seemed glad to see her. She was about to sit where her father had dragged a chair for her when someone knocked at the back door.
They could see Shar’s face at the pane. “Well, let him in,” Karen’s father said. One of the men put down the saucer of coffee he had been sipping at and, without standing, reached around and opened the door. “Come in, come in,” Karen’s father said. Karen’s heart began to pound. She had not sat beside her father, but stood, staring at Shar; she felt now the mistake of her coming down here, the error she had made in forcing her company into the company of men. She belonged in her room, in her bed, safe in sleep or in the sluggish halo of sleep that came with dawn.
Shar brought cold air in with him. “Thought you’d want to know,” he said, “he’s back there dead.”
“Dead?” said Karen’s father. He put down his coffee cup. “Rule’s dead?”
“Dead,” said Shar. “What do you think? It must of happened sometime last night. I don’t know. I never woke up till a few minutes ago.”
Karen’s father sighed and pushed back his chair. “All right. We’d better go back there.”
Karen backed away as the men got up and put on their jackets. The sleepy vacuity of their faces, the complacence of her father, astonished her. A man dead so close to them—dead while they sat eating and joking! Her mind spun. She stood blinking at the scuffed floor while they mumbled and grumbled and put on their boots. Someone lit a cigarette.
Then the door opened again and they went out. Karen saw her father and Shar out on the porch talking and the other men waiting. She went to the door and put her arms out against it as if she were embracing something. Her father was telling Shar something, Shar shrugged his shoulders, looking around—he nearly saw her, his eyes flashed across the window and away. Then her father stepped down and Shar turned to stare at his back.
Karen turned. She thought of going to tell Celine; but Celine would only pretend to care. Celine would think it was queer of Karen to feel this way—and Karen did not know exactly how she felt. She picked up the thick white cup her father had left and turned it in her fingers; it was still warm. She set it down again. There was nothing for her to do. She tried to think of Rule but, inexplicably, only the old misshapen rock on which he had sat to fish came to mind—she wondered suddenly if Shar knew about it or remembered it, whether she ought to tell him in a few days. . . .
The door opened again and Shar appeared. He looked sullen. “I got to drive in to town to see the sheriff, your old man tells me. He says for you to come along.”
“What?” said Karen.
“For you to come along,” he said. He held the door open upon the glaring air. “To show me the way. I forgot the way to town.”
“Do you have to go now?” Karen said. She stared at him in disbelief. “Now? When your father is—”
“I got to go now. The sheriff has to come out and look at him and I got to see about some other things too, your old man says. He says for you to come along.”
Karen got her coat and joined him. The air was fresh, freshly assaulting. They went to the barn where Shar had parked his car. The automobile was a little dusty, but it was a kind Karen had never seen before: gaudy, magnificent, overlarge, decorated with strips and twists of chrome that might have meant something in a secret symbolic language. The thought that Shar had money suddenly occurred to Karen, for all this vulgarity would not have come cheaply. She felt almost compelled by the size of the automobile to say something about it.
She got in by herself. Shar slid in beside her and slammed the door. They did not look at each other. Karen felt numb and cold and baffled, as if a fog had come between her and what she must see, so that she could not exactly understand what was happening. “I s’pose he was a little crazy,” Shar said.
His voice was harsh. He backed the car out of the barn, jerked it to a halt, then rushed forward so that the tires dug into the loose cinders. She heard him take a big breath. She watched with a tightening sensation the way the trees alongside the drive careened toward them, tilting slightly from side to side as the car picked up speed. “Huh? Don’t you think so?” Shar said.
“What?” said Karen in alarm.
“The old bastard was a little crazy.”
The drive dropped to the clay road. Karen shut her eyes. She could feel the pressure of the door against her side, hard against her side, and could hear Shar’s voice—as though from a distance. Suddenly she put her hands to her face. “I always thought so,” Shar said in his harsh, morning-slurred voice. They turned out onto the road and approached the bridge. It was an old rusted bridge, built before Karen was born, spanning the creek with a rattle of boards and high intricate beams that looked like a parody of a real bridge. It had been struck by lightning many times and had been a favorite place for the boys to play—Karen remembered Shar jumping from the top beam—and though, when she was a child, she had screamed when they approached it, she had gradually come to accept and forget about
it; her father had assured her, his hand on his heart and no fingers crossed, that it would never collapse while she was on it.
“One time I did something he didn’t like,” Shar said almost conversationally, “—chased the chickens around or something. And he made me go down to the crick with him and he got a big limb that was laying down there, half rotten. He said he would have to lick me. I took a look at that limb and told him he wasn’t going to. I told him that. I was about twelve. So he stands there holding the big limb, with little black ants going crazy running around on it, and looks at it, and says he would have to lick me. But he never moved and just stood there talking to himself or maybe to me, I couldn’t hear him. He was looking out at the crick too where there’s the yellow birds flying around the stones—it was summer then, and the stones sticking up dry—and he stands there like he forgot me, so after a while I went away. He must of forgot about it. He never said anything. I s’pose the son of a bitch was crazy for years.”