Perhaps my dynamite plants will put an end to war sooner than your congresses. On the day two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations will recoil in horror.
Today the wind veers south, the clouds are thickening, but the storm front seems stalled. I imagine it as a trailing spiral on a weather satellite picture on television. Once we took such miracles for granted.
The possibility of becoming a victim of murder, or divine justice, makes me exceedingly wary. Yet when I consider Miriam’s options—and I spent long hours of a restless night considering them— they seem few. At least, they are fewer now that I’m aware of the possibility and intend to avoid being alone in dangerous places.
I’ve considered the option of poison. Bernadette grows a number of plants that are poisonous as well as medicinal, but how would Miriam administer a poison to me? We eat out of communal dishes, and she’s never been so solicitous as to offer me a cup of tea or anything of that sort, and forewarned as I am now, I’d never accept such an offering.
Of course, I sleep alone. She could easily slip out of the basement after the children and Esther are asleep. The children sleep the sound sleep of all children, and Miriam has often teased Esther about her deep, snoring sleep. “The house could fall down, and you’d never know it.” There are no locks on the doors to my room. Miriam might smother an old woman with a pillow and claim she died of natural causes. Except that this old woman may be a bit stiff and slow, but still quite capable of struggling and making noise, and Jerry’s bedroom is only a few feet away. Besides, Shadow always sleeps at the foot of my bed. She would certainly raise an alarm.
Yet I’m not comforted by these considerations. I’ve seen the way Miriam looks at me. The banked fire still burns behind her eyes. She hasn’t surrendered.
She can’t. She has made fallacies the basis of her perception of the world, and if their falseness is demonstrated, her system of perception will shatter like a house built of fine threads of glass. I am the one who stands outside her fragile temple of dark, spiderweb glass with a hammer in hand.
For the family, this day—Tuesday, the fourth of May—is again business as usual, although the tension is stultifying. The children are irritable, the younger ones prone to fits of temper or tears. The adults find inanimate objects on which to vent their frustration: the threads that break, the pot that boils over, the saw that sticks in the cut. I go about my business as usual, too, trying to avoid the adults yet remain close enough so that a cry for help could be heard.
But as the day grinds on I wonder if I could look to the others for help if I needed it. Today it is even more obvious that they blame me for this schism. Especially Jerry. Only pride stops him from backing down on his decision to let me continue teaching the children.
After the midday meal I go out on the deck to wait for Stephen, grateful that the impending rain hasn’t yet arrived. The wind blows erratically, but it’s not so strong that the sun can’t overcome its chill. I don’t know where the various members of the family are, or what they’re doing. Usually we discuss such matters during meals. We didn’t today.
When Stephen finally arrives, Diamond and Pepper have inveigled Shadow into a game of tag. We watch them for a while, and I savor the pleasure of finding something to laugh about. But Stephen seems to curb his laughter as if he thinks it wouldn’t be appropriate. At length, the dogs take a break to lie panting in the grass, and Stephen settles back in his chair with the faint frown that has become habitual lately.
I ask, “How are you, Stephen?”
I think he knows I’m asking about more than his physical state, but he doesn’t want to, or can’t, go beyond that. “I’m fine, Mary.” He calls up a smile that at first is automatic, but when I hold his gaze with a questioning look, the smile leaves his mouth, finally manifests itself in his eyes. “Are you all right, Mary? I mean… well, it’s been…”
“It’s been tense, to say the least. I’m fine, too. I worked on the Chronicle last night. I only wish my poor hands could write as fast as my mind remembers.” As I speak I reach into my pocket and take out one of the diaries, but I don’t open it.
Stephen watches me, then he draws one knee up, clasps his hands around it. “What did you do after… after Rachel passed on?”
Those damned euphemisms. He learned them from the adults, who live entrenched in euphemisms. But I see in his eyes a cast of grief and take satisfaction in it. Not for making him grieve—and it isn’t personal grief, not intense enough to cause him real pain—but because it is a response to Rachel’s death. If her death has affected him, it is because her life has meaning for him.
I look out at the sea, slubbed with whitecaps. “After Rachel died… well, I came home. I don’t remember anything about the trip. I just remember one day I was standing at the east gate. When I went in, the dogs and goats came out to greet me. They were all healthy, and I was amazed at that. But Rachel had only been gone about ten days. I was the one who’d been gone so long. Of course, Shadow wasn’t here. I knew she wouldn’t be, and it seemed so strange that nothing else had changed. I kept expecting…”
He finishes that for me, nearly whispering: “Rachel.”
“Yes. I wandered around, checking the barn, the garden, the orchard. And finally the house. It took an act of will to enter this house. In every room I met Rachel’s absence, even in the trail of blood on the floor from the backdoor to the bathroom.”
“That must’ve been a hard time for you.”
Hard? I want to laugh at the pitiful inadequacy of that word. But he doesn’t know a better way to express it. Nor do I. “Stephen, did I ever tell you the story of the Buddha and the mustard seed?”
He shakes his head, eyeing me curiously. He has some idea who the Buddha was, although he knows very little about Buddhism. Not yet.
I begin, “Well, it seems a woman came to Siddartha, the Buddha, and told him her child had died and begged him to restore the child to life. The Buddha said he would—if she brought him a mustard seed from a house where no one had died or grieved a death. Of course, she couldn’t find such a house, and that was his point. Grief is inescapable.”
Stephen ponders that. “But Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.”
“Oh, indeed. After poor Lazarus was four days dead. At least, Jesus raised Lazarus according to John. Odd that none of the other gospels mention this astounding event.”
His eyes go to black slits. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. But you can check it yourself.” No doubt Miriam won’t balk at his wasting candles in order to read the Bible.
“That’s… strange.” Then with a sigh: “But how did you stand it? The grief, I mean, when you were all alone here.”
I hesitate, finally shrug. “I don’t know how, but for the first month I think what kept me going was my baby. I had to consider its future, which meant my future, and that meant planting the garden and taking care of the animals, all the things necessary to living. And I decided the first night that I couldn’t avoid memories of Rachel. This place is still steeped in her. I had to face the memories. I began by studying every object she had used or loved. I went to her favorite places, like the tree or the tide pools at the foot of the Knob. I looked at her paintings and drawings. And I started a notebook. I wrote down everything I could remember her saying. I mean, everything I thought significant. It was particularly painful, the notebook, but a strange thing happened after about a month. I found I was writing my thoughts, too. They all melded into one, and I couldn’t be sure where her ideas left off and mine began. It was a revelation and a catharsis. And about that time I sealed the first book since my return. Rachel had worked on the books while I was gone, but there were still over two thousand left. When I finished sealing that first book, I felt… almost whole again.”