6
In the days which follow, she begins to look obsessively at her hands and her arms and her face ... but mostly at her hands, because that is where it will start.
Where what will start? She doesn't know, exactly ... but she knows she will recognize (the tree)
it when she sees it.
She discovers a place called Elmo's Batting Cages on the west side of the city and begins to go there regularly. Most of the clientele are men in early middle age trying to keep their college figures or high-school boys willing to spend five dollars or so for the privilege of pretending for a little while that they are Ken Griffey, Jr., or the Big Hurt. Every now and then a girlfriend will hit a few, but mostly they are ornamental, standing outside the batting cages or the slightly more expensive Major League Batting Tunnel and watching. There are few women in their mid-thirties stroking grounders and line drives. Few? None, really, except for this lady with the short brown hair and the pale, solemn face. So the boys joke and snigger and elbow each other and turn their caps around backward to show how bad they are, and she ignores them completely, both their laughter and their careful inventory of her body, which has bounced back nicely from the baby. Nicely? For a chick who is clearly getting up there (they tell each other), she is a knockout, a stone fox.
And after awhile, they stop laughing. They stop because the lady in the sleeveless tee-shirts and loose gray pants, after her initial clumsiness and foul ticks (several times she is even hit by the dense rubber balls the machine serves up), begins to make first good contact and then great contact.
"She drivin' that beauty," one of them says one day after Rosie, panting and flushed, her hair drawn back against her head in a damp helmet, screams three line drives, one after the other, the length of the mesh-walled batting tunnel. Each time she connects she voices a high, unearthly cry, like Monica Seles serving an ace. It sounds as if the ball has done something to offend her.
"Got that machine cranked, too," says a second as the pitching machine hulking in the center of the tunnel coughs out an eighty-mile-an-hour fastball. Rosie gives her indrawn cry of effort, her head down almost against her shoulder, and pops her hips. The ball goes the other way, fast. It hits the mesh two hundred feet away down the tunnel, still rising, making the green fabric bell out before dropping to join the others which she has already hit.
"Aw, she ain't hittin that hard," scoffs a third. He takes out a cigarette, pokes it in his mouth, takes out a book of matches, and strikes one. "She just gettin some--"
This time Rosie does scream--a cry like the shriek of some hungry bird--and the ball streaks back down the tunnel in a flat white line. It hits the mesh ... and goes through. The hole it leaves behind looks like something which might have been made by a shotgun fired at close range.
Cigarette Boy stands as if frozen, the lit match burning down in his fingers.
"You were sayin, bro?" the first boy asks softly.
7
A month later, just after the batting cages close for the season, Rhoda Simons suddenly breaks into Rosie's reading of the new Gloria Naylor and tells her to call it a day. Rosie protests that it's early. Rhoda agrees, but tells her she is losing her expression; better to give it a rest until tomorrow, she says.
"Yeah, well, I want to finish today," Rosie says. "It's only another twenty pages. I want to finish the damned thing, Rho."
"Anything you do now will just have to be done over," Rhoda says with finality. "I don't know how late Pamelacita kept you up last night, but you just don't have it anymore today."
8
Rosie gets up and goes through the door, yanking it so hard she nearly tears it off its fat silent hinges. Then, in the control room, she seizes the suddenly terrified Rhoda Simons by the collar of her goddamned Norma Kamali blouse, and slams her facedown into the control board. A toggle switch impales her patrician nose like the tine of a barbecue fork. Blood sprays everywhere, beading on the glass of the studio window and running down it in ugly rose madder streaks.
"Rosie, no!" Curt Hamilton shrieks. "My God, what are you doing?"
Rosie hooks her nails into Rhoda's throbbing throat and tears it open, shoving her face into the hot spew of blood, wanting to bathe in it, wanting to baptize this new life which she has been so stupidly struggling against. And there is no need to answer Curt; she knows perfectly well what she is doing, she is repaying, that's what, repaying, and God help anyone on the wrong side of her account books. God help--
9
"Rosie?" Rhoda calls the iotercom, rousing her from this horrid yet deeply compelling daydream. "Are you okay?"
Keep your temper, little Rosie.
Keep your temper and remember the tree.
She looks down and sees the pencil she has been holding is now in two pieces. She stares at them for several seconds, breathing deeply, trying to get her racing heart under control. When she feels she can speak in a more or less even tone of voice, she says: "Yeah, I'm okay. But you're right, the kiddo kept me up late and I'm tired. Let's rack it in."
"Smart girl," Rhoda says, and the woman on the other side of the glass--the woman who is taking off the headphones with hands that only shake a little--thinks, No. Not smart. Angry. Angry girl.
I repay, a voice deep in her mind whispers. Sooner or later, little Rosie, I repay. Whether you want it or not, I repay.
10
She expects to lie awake all that night, but she sleeps briefly after midnight and dreams. It is a tree she dreams of, the tree, and when she wakes she thinks: No wonder it's been so hard for me to understand. No wonder. All this time I was thinking of the wrong one.
She lies back next to Bill, looking up at the ceiling and thinking of the dream. In it she heard the sound of gulls over the lake, crying and crying, and Bill's voice. They'll be all right if they keep normal, Bill was saying. If they keep normal and remember the tree.
She knows what she must do.
11
The next day she calls Rhoda and says she won't be in. A touch of the flu, she says. Then she goes back out Route 27 to Shoreland, this time by herself. On the seat next to her is her old purse, the one she carried out of Egypt. She has the picnic area to herself at this time of the day and year. She takes her shoes off, puts them under a picnic table, and walks north through the shallow water at the edge of the lake, as she did with Bill when he brought her out here the first time. She thinks she may have trouble finding the overgrown path leading up the bank, but she does not. As she goes up it, digging into the gritty sand with her bare toes, she wonders how many unremembered dreams have taken her out here since the rages started. There is no way of telling, of course, nor does it really matter.
At the top of the path is the ragged clearing, and in the clearing is the fallen tree--the one she has finally remembered. She has never forgotten the things which happened to her in the world of the picture, and she sees now, with no iota of surprise, that this tree and the one which had fallen across the path leading to Dorcas's "pomegranate tree" are identical.
She can see the foxes' earth beneath the dusty bouquet of roots at the far left end of the tree, but it is empty, and looks old. She walks to it anyway, then kneels--she is not sure her trembling legs would have supported her much farther, anyway. She opens her old purse and pours out the remains of her old life on the leafy, mulchy ground. Among crumpled laundry lists and receipts years out of date, below a shopping list with the words
PORK CHOPS
at the top, underlined, capitalized, and exclamation-pointed (pork chops were always Norman's favorite), is the blue packet with the spatter of red-purple drops running across it.
Trembling, beginning to cry--partly because the scraps of her old, hurt life make her so sad and partly because she is so afraid that the new one is in danger--she scoops a hole in the earth at the base of the fallen tree. When it is about eight inches deep, she puts the packet down beside it and opens it. The seed is still there, surrounded by the gold circle of her first husband's rin
g.
She puts the seed in the hole (and the seed has kept its magic; her fingers go numb the instant they touch it) and then places the ring around it again.
"Please," she says, not knowing if she prays, or for whom the prayer is intended if she does. In any case, she is answered, after a fashion. There is a short, sharp bark. There's no pity in it, no compassion, no gentleness. It is impatient. Don't fuck with me, it says.
Rosie looks up and sees the vixen on the far side of the clearing, standing motionless and looking at her. Her brush is up. It flames like a torch against the dull gray sky overhead.
"Please," she says again in a low, troubled voice. "Please don't let me be what I'm afraid of. Please .... just please help me keep my temper and remember the tree."
There is nothing she can interpret as an answer, not even another of those impatient barks. The vixen only stands there. Its tongue is out now, and it is panting. To Rosie it appears to be grinning.
She looks down once more at the ring circling the seed, then she covers it over with the fragrant, mulchy dirt.
One for my mistress, she thinks, and one for my dame, and one for the little girl who lives down the lane. One for Rosie.
She backs to the edge of the clearing, to the head of the path which will take her back down to the lakeshore. When she is there, the vixen trots quickly to the fallen tree, sniffs the spot where Rosie buried the ring and the seed, and then lies down there. Still she pants, and still she grins (Rosie is now sure she is grinning), still she looks at Rosie with her black eyes. The kits are gone, those eyes say, and the dog that got them on me is gone, as well. But I, Rosie ... I bide. And, if needs must, I repay.
Rosie looks for madness or sanity in those eyes ... and sees both.
Then the vixen lowers her pretty snout to her pretty bush, closes her eyes, and appears to go to sleep.
"Please," Rosie whispers, one final time, and then she leaves. And as she drives the Skyway, on her way back to what she hopes is her life, she throws the last piece of her old life--the purse she brought with her out of Egypt--out the driver's-side window and into Coori Bay.
12
The rages have departed.
The child, Pamela, is far from grown, but she is old enough to have her own friends, to have developed applebud breasts, to have begun her monthly courses. Old enough so she and her mother have started to argue about clothes and nights out and nights in and what she may do and whom she may see and for how long. The hurricane season of Pam's adolescence has not fully started yet, but Rosie knows it is coming. She views it with equanimity, however, because the rages have departed.
Bill's hair has gone mostly gray and started to recede.
Rosie's is still brown. She wears it simply, around her shoulders. She sometimes puts it up, but never plaits it.
It is years since they have picnicked out at Shoreland, on State Highway 27; Bill seems to have forgotten about it when he sold his Harley-Davidson, and he sold the Harley because, he said, "My reflexes are too slow, Rosie. When your pleasures become risks, it's time to cut them out." She doesn't argue this idea, but it seems to her that Bill has sold a huge batch of memories along with his scoot, and she mourns these. It is as if much of his youth was tucked into its saddlebags, and he forgot to check and take it out before the nice young man from Evanston drove the motorcycle away.
They don't picnic there anymore, but once a year, always in the spring, Rosie goes out by herself. She has watched the new tree grow in the shadow of the old fallen one from a sprig to a twig to a sturdy young growth with a smooth, straight trunk and confident branches. She has watched it raise itself, year by year, in the clearing where no fox-kits now gambol. She sits before it silently, sometimes for as long as an hour, with her hands folded neatly in her lap. She does not come here to worship or to pray, but she has a sense of rightness and ritual about being here, a sense of duty fulfilled, of some unstated covenant's renewal. And if being here helps keep her from hurting anyone--Bill, Pammy, Rhoda, Curt (Rob Lefferts is not a worry; the year Pammy turned five, he died quietly of a heart attack)--then it is time well-spent.
How perfectly this tree grows! Already its young branches are densely dressed in narrow leaves of a dark green hue, and in the last two years she has seen hard flashes of color deep within those leaves--blossoms which will, in this tree's later years, become fruit. If someone were to happen by this clearing and eat of that fruit, Rosie is sure the result would be death, and a hideous death, at that. She worries about it, from time to time, but until she sees signs that other people have been here, she doesn't worry overmuch. So far she has seen no such sign, not so much as a single beercan, cigarette pack, or gum wrapper. Now it is enough simply to come here, and to fold her clear, unblemished hands in her lap, and look at the tree of her rage and the hard splashes of rose madder that will become, in later years, the numb-sweet fruit of death.
Sometimes as she sits before this little tree, she sings. "I'm really Rosie, " she sings, "and I'm Rosie Real ... you better believe me ... I'm a great big deal ... "
She isn't a big deal, of course, except to the people who matter in her life, but since these are the only ones she cares about, that's fine. All accounts balance, as the woman in the zat might have said. She has reached safe harbor, and on these spring mornings near the lake, sitting in the overgrown, silent clearing which has never changed over all the years (it is very like a picture, that way--the sort of humdrum painting one might find in an old curio shop, or a pawn-and-loan), her legs folded beneath her, she sometimes feels a gratitude so full that she thinks her heart can hold no more, ever. It is this gratitude that makes her sing. She must sing. There is no other choice.
And sometimes the vixen--old now, her own years of bearing long behind her, her brilliant bush streaked with wiry threads of gray--comes to the edge of the clearing, and stands, and seems to listen to Rosie sing. Her black eyes as she stands there communicate no clear thought to Rosie, but it is impossible to mistake the essential sanity of the old and clever brain behind them.
June 10, 1993--November 17, 1994
Stephen King, Rose Madder
(Series: # )
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