Afterward she said, “I’m so glad you’re back home, Tildie.”
“So you don’t have to do the dishes all by yourself.”
She smiled. “I knew you’d be back,” she said.
“Did you? I wonder if I knew. I don’t think so. I thought I wanted to live in a city, or in a college town. I thought I wanted to be a professor’s wife and have earnest conversations about literature and politics and art. I guess I was just a country girl all along.”
“You always loved it here,” she said. “Of course it will be yours when I’m gone, and I had it in mind that you’d come back to it then. But I hoped you wouldn’t wait that long.”
She had never left. She and her mother lived here, and when she married my father he just moved in. It’s a big old house, with different wings added over the years. He moved in, and then he left, and she just stayed on.
I remembered something. “I don’t know if I thought I’d live here again,” I said, “but I always thought I would die here.” She looked at me, and I said, “Not so much die here as be buried here. When we buried Grandma I thought, Well, this is where they’ll bury me someday. And I always thought that.”
Grandma Yount’s grave is on our land, just to the east of the pear and apple orchard. There are graves there dating back to when our people first lived here. The two children Mama lost are laid to rest there, and Grandma Yount’s mother, and a great many children. It wasn’t that long ago that people would have four or five children to raise one. You can’t read what’s cut into most of the stones, it’s worn away with time, and it wears faster now that we have the acid rain, but the stones are there, the graves are there, and I always knew I’d be there, too.
“Well, I’ll be there, too,” Mama said. “But not too soon, I hope.”
“No, not soon at all,” I said. “Let’s live a long time. Let’s be old ladies together.”
I thought it was a sweet conversation, a beautiful conversation. But when I told Dan about it we wound up fighting.
“When she goes,” he said, “that’s when those walnuts go to market.”
“That’s all you can think about,” I said. “Turning a beautiful grove into dollars.”
“That timber’s money in the bank,” he said, “except it’s not in the bank because anybody could come in and haul it out of there behind our backs.”
“Nobody’s going to do that.”
“And other things could happen. It’s no good for a tree to let it grow beyond its prime. Insects can get it, or disease. There’s one tree already that was struck by lightning.”
“It didn’t hurt it much.”
“When they’re my trees,” he said, “they’re coming down.”
“They won’t be your trees.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Mama’s not leaving the place to you, Dan.”
“I thought what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine.”
“I love those trees,” I said. “I’m not going to see them cut.” His face darkened, and a muscle worked in his jaw. This was a warning sign, and I knew it as such, but I was stuck in a pattern, God help me, and I couldn’t leave it alone. “First you’d sell off the timber,” I said, “and then you’d sell off the acreage.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Why? Your daddy did.”
Dan grew up on a farm that came down through his father’s father. Unable to make a living farming, first his grandfather and then his father had sold off parcels of land little by little, whittling away at their holdings and each time reducing the potential income of what remained. After Dan’s mother died his father had stopped farming altogether and drank full time, and the farm was auctioned for back taxes while Dan was still in high school.
I knew what it would do to him and yet I threw that in his face all the same. I couldn’t seem to help it, any more than he could help what followed.
At breakfast the next day the silence made me want to scream. Dan read the paper while he ate, then hurried out the door without a word. I couldn’t hear the screen door when it banged shut or the car engine when it started up. Mama’s silence — and his, and mine — drowned out everything else.
I thought I’d burst when we were doing the dishes. She didn’t say a word and neither did I. Afterward she turned to me and said, “I didn’t go to college so I don’t know about patterns, or what you do and what it makes him do.”
The quattrocento and rats in a maze, that’s all I learned in college. What I know about patterns and family violence I learned watching Oprah and Phil Donahue, and she watched the same programs I did. (“He blacked your eye and broke your nose. He kicked you in the stomach while you were pregnant. How can you stay with a brute like this?” “But I love him, Geraldo. And I know he loves me.”)
“I just know one thing,” she said. “It won’t get better. And it will get worse.”
“No.”
“Yes. And you know it, Tildie.”
“No.”
He hadn’t blacked my eye or broken my nose, but he had hammered my face with his fists and it was swollen and discolored. He hadn’t kicked me in the stomach but he had shoved me from him. I had been clinging to his arm. That was stupid, I knew better than to do that, it drove him crazy to have me hang on him like that. He had shoved me and I’d gone sprawling, wrenching my leg when I fell on it. My knee ached now, and the muscles in the front of that thigh were sore. And my rib cage was sore where he’d punched me.
But I love him, Geraldo, Oprah, Phil. And I know he loves me.
That night he didn’t come home.
I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t catch my breath. Livia caught my anxiety and wouldn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep. I held her in my arms and paced the floor in front of the television set. Back and forth, back and forth.
At midnight finally I put her in her crib and she slept. Mama was playing solitaire at the pine table. Only the top is pine, the base is maple. An antique, Dan pronounced it when he first saw it, and better than the ones in the shops. I suppose he had it priced in his mind, along with the walnut trees.
I pointed out a move. Mama said, “I know about that. I just haven’t decided whether I want to do it, that’s all.” But she always says that. I don’t believe she saw it.
At one I heard our car turn off the road and onto the gravel. She heard it, too, and gathered up the cards and said she was tired now, she’d just turn in. She was out of the room and up the stairs before he came in the door.
He was drunk. He lurched into the room, his shirt open halfway to his waist, his eyes unfocused. He said, “Oh, Jesus, Tildie, what’s happening to us?”
“Shhh,” I said. “You’ll wake the baby.”
“I’m sorry, Tildie,” he said. “I’m sorry, I’m so goddam sorry.”
Going up the stairs, he spun away from me and staggered into the railing. It held. I got him upstairs and into our room, but he passed out the minute he lay down on our bed. I got his shoes off, and his shirt and pants, and let him sleep in his socks and underwear.
In the morning he was still sleeping when I got up to take care of Livia. Mama had his breakfast on the table, his coffee poured, the newspaper at his place. He rushed through the kitchen without a word to anybody, tore out the door, and was gone. I moved toward the door but Mama was in my path.
I cried, “Mama, he’s leaving! He’ll never be back!”
She glanced meaningfully at Livia. I stepped back, lowered my voice. “He’s leaving,” I said, helpless. He had started the car, he was driving away. “I’ll never see him again.”