“Yes.”
“And he loves me, Mama. Don’t you think it tears him up when something like this happens? Don’t you think it eats at him?”
“It must.”
“It does!” I thought how he’d cried last night, how he’d held me and touched the mark on my cheek and cried. “And we’re going to try to do something about it,” I said. “To break the pattern. There’s a clinic in Fulton City where you can go for counseling. It’s not expensive, either.”
“And you’re going?”
“We’ve talked about it. We’re considering it.”
She looked at me and I made myself meet her eyes. After a moment she looked away. “Well, you would know more about this sort of thing than I do,” she said. “You went to college, you studied, you learned things.”
I studied art history. I can tell you about the Italian Renaissance, although I have already forgotten much of what I learned. I took one psychology course in my freshman year and we observed the behavior of white rats in mazes.
“Mama,” I said, “I know you disapprove.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Tildie, that’s not so.”
“It’s not?”
She shook her head. “I just hurt for you,” she said. “That’s all.”
We live on 220 acres, only a third of them level. The farm has been in our family since the land was cleared early in the last century. It has been years since we farmed it. The MacNaughtons run sheep in our north pastures, and Mr. Parkhill leases forty acres, planting alfalfa one year and field corn the next. Mama has some bank stock and some utilities, and the dividends plus what she’s paid for the land rent are enough to keep her. There’s no mortgage on the land and the taxes have stayed low. And she has a big kitchen garden. We eat out of it all summer long and put up enough in the fall to carry us through the winter.
Dan studied comparative lit while I studied art history. He got a master’s and did half the course work for a doctorate and then knew he couldn’t do it anymore. He got a job driving a taxi and I worked waiting tables at Paddy Mac’s, where we used to come for beer and hamburgers when we were students. When I got pregnant with Livia he didn’t want me on my feet all day but we couldn’t make ends meet on his earnings as a cabdriver. Rents were high in that city, and everything cost a fortune.
And we both loved country living, and knew the city was no place to bring up Livia. So we moved here, and Dan got work right away with a construction company in Caldwell. That’s the nearest town, just six miles from us on country roads, and Fulton City is only twenty-two miles.
After that conversation with Mama I went outside and walked back beyond the garden and the pear and apple orchard. There’s a stream runs diagonally across our land, and just beyond it is the spot I always liked the best, where the walnut trees are. We have a whole grove of black walnuts, twenty-six trees in all. I know because Dan counted them. He was trying to estimate what they’d bring.
Walnut is valuable. People will pay thousands of dollars for a mature tree. They make veneer from it, because it’s too costly to use as solid wood.
“We ought to sell these off,” Dan said. “Your mama’s got an untapped resource here. Somebody could come in, cut ’em down, and steal ’em. Like poachers in Kenya, killing the elephants for their ivory.”
“No one’s going to come onto our land.”
“You never know. Anyway, it’s a waste. You can’t even see this spot from the house. And nobody does anything with the nuts.”
When I was a girl my mama and I used to gather the walnuts after they fell in early autumn. Thousands fell from the trees. We would just gather a basketful and crack them with a hammer and pick the meat out. My hands always got black from the husks and stayed that way for weeks.
We only did this a few times. It was after Daddy left, but while Grandma Yount was still alive. I don’t remember Grandma bothering with the walnuts, but she did lots of other things. When the cherries came in we would all pick them and she would bake pies and put up jars of the rest, and she’d boil the pits to clean them and sew scraps of cloth to make beanbags. There are still beanbags in the attic that Grandma Yount made. I’d brought one down for Livia and fancied I could still smell cherries through the cloth.
“We could harvest the walnuts,” I told Dan. “If you want.”
“What for? You can’t get anything for them. Too much trouble to open and hardly any meat in them. I’d sooner harvest the trees.”
“Mama likes having them here.”
“They’re worth a fortune. And they’re a renewable resource. You could cut them and plant more and someday they’d put your grandchildren through college.”
“You don’t need to cut them to plant more. There’s other land we could use.”
“No point planting more if you’re not going to cut these, is there? What do we need them for?”
“What do our grandchildren need college for?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” I’d said, backing away.
And hours later he’d taken it up again. “You meant I wasted my education,” he said. “That’s what you meant by that crack, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Then what did you mean? What do I need a master’s for to hammer a nail? That’s what you meant.”
“It’s not, but evidently that’s how you’d rather hear it.”
He hit me for that. I guess I had it coming. I don’t know if I deserved it, I don’t know if a woman deserves to get hit, but I guess I provoked it. Something makes me say things I shouldn’t, things he’ll take amiss. I don’t know why.
Except I do know why, and I’d walked out of the kitchen and across to the walnut grove to keep from talking about it to Mama. Because he had his pattern and I had mine.
His was what he’d learned from his daddy, which was to abuse a woman, to slap her, to strike her with his fists. And mine was a pattern I’d learned from my mama, which was to make a man leave you, to taunt him with your mouth until one day he put his clothes in a suitcase and walked out the door.
In the mornings it tore at me to hear the screen door slam. Because I thought, Tildie, one day you’ll hear that sound and it’ll be for the last time. One day you’ll do what your mother managed to do, and he’ll do like your father did and you’ll never see him again. And Livia will grow up as you did, in a house with her mother and her grandmother, and she’ll have cherry-pit beanbags to play with and she’ll pick the meat out of black walnuts, but what will she do for a daddy? And what will you do for a man?
All the rest of that week he never raised his hand to me. One night Mama stayed with Livia while Dan and I went to a movie in Fulton City. Afterward we went to a place that reminded us both of Paddy Mac’s, and we drank beer and got silly. Driving home, we rolled down the car windows and sang songs at the top of our lungs. By the time we got home the beer had worn off but we were still happy and we hurried upstairs to our room.
Mama didn’t say anything next morning but I caught her looking at me and knew she’d heard the old iron bedstead. I thought, You hear a lot, even with your good ear pressed against the pillow. Well, if she had to hear the fighting, let her hear the loving, too.
She could have heard the bed that night, too, although it was a quieter and gentler lovemaking than the night before. There were no knowing glances the next day, but after the screen door closed behind Dan and after Livia was in for her nap, there was a nice easiness between us as we stood side by side doing the breakfast dishes.