Of late Catherine who was not of a religious bent wondered what became of Tim after suicide. Christians would say that suicides went directly to hell, wherever that was. It was left over from Sunday school she supposed. Catherine was unsure of hell or an afterlife but thought his lifelong pain should count for something. She had watched a local man limping on the sidewalk. He had lost his toes to the cold in Korea. It could have been worse and local lazy people envied his disability payments. Something for nothing was the ultimate good as far as they were concerned. War was hardly nothing. She regretted not being able to help Clyde load the hay bales onto the wagon and then into the barn because of her pregnancy.
Mother wept for a couple of days and then in a torrent of garbled language apologized to Catherine for the abuses in her raising. The first duty, she said, of a mother is to protect her children, even from her husband. Her own husband had never gotten out of himself for even a moment. Once assured of Catherine’s forgiveness her mother declined dramatically as if this forgiveness had been her life’s work. Catherine called Jerry in Key West saying that the situation was serious. Jerry said he’d try to get away. She thought, From your fishing and adulterous fucking. Meanwhile, she had to get her mother several appointments with a psychiatrist in the county seat because she was plainly becoming daft. She would sit on the front porch talking to Robert who was obviously not there. She drove her mother the two hours to the prison to visit Robert but her mother couldn’t complete the mission. She vomited in the parking lot seeing the walls and razor wire fencing. She was catatonically angry. “Why put him here just because he burned that piece of shit house?” Catherine had tried to explain Robert’s refusal to fight for himself. By the time of the fire her ex-husband’s illusions had plainly gotten out of hand. He was pretending he was “old money” living in a grand home though he was borrowing gin money from hunting acquaintances. Catherine figured that his delusions came from a lifetime of hard drinking.
Chapter 13
Catherine drove Jerry and her mother to the Texan’s landing strip. The Texan had only dropped Jerry off the day before in his new Jeep Wagoneer. No one local would use a six-thousand-dollar vehicle to roam his ranch. Catherine was glad to see them leave, flying east to Rochester, Minnesota, to get her mother admitted to Mayo. Her mother sobbed piteously while boarding the plane because she couldn’t stay to help with the oncoming baby. Help by being a relentless pain in the ass? Catherine thought wryly. You couldn’t miss Jerry’s self-importance in boarding a private jet.
She daily felt heavier and more awkward but was pleased when the baby kicked in her womb. She could barely make her morning stroll with Hud out to the pond and boneyard behind the barn. One day it was cool and rainy and she refused to go and he actually wept until she relented, bundled in a sweater and raincoat. She reminded herself of the perils of starting habits with dogs. In the big pasture they had to go back every time to the rock pile where he had once almost but not quite caught a big black snake. He was obviously goaded by his failure.
Near the pond she sat on a big rock with a peculiar resemblance to a monster stone egg. It had been Catherine’s “magic” place since early childhood. When she frequently visited the farm with her mother she’d walk out to her stone egg when she was disturbed by anything and the stillness of the scene pacified her. How can you draw pure energy from a stone? It was possible for her. Later in life it occurred to her that in the serenity of the place she had arrived at a point of child meditation where her mind emptied itself of its enervating trash and she could identify with the pond and big pile of white cow bones. Now it amused her when Hud tried to pick up the pelvis of a cow skeleton. His jaws weren’t strong enough yet to pick it up but he had slowly dragged it about halfway to his trophy hideout in the front yard lilac grove. Such extreme effort for his own private reasons. Like a child he had his own collection of “stuff” whose importance was clear only to the owner.
She sat there on the stone egg and was flooded with rare sympathy for her mother. Her father’s promise of a farm in Montana was an outrageous lie and it was obvious that he’d never had any intention of keeping that promise. Her grandfather in England told her that her father was a “scoundrel.” Who in his right mind would rather run a tiny bank than be a farmer? This was during a long conversation during the Blitz. Her grandparents had urged their daughter early on to leave the bastard but along came Robert and her. Even his own parents were not that fond of him, preferring the company of Catherine’s mother. She was always absolutely welcome at the farm but it would have been a small town scandal had she moved out there permanently. Now Catherine believed that she should have. What did it really matter if her mother had embraced her singular desire? It was a brutal lesson indeed to both mother and daughter. To live at a distance of a half dozen miles from where your heart was.
As she sat there scratching Hud’s ears which he loved the worry about Tim was nagging at her, this idea that suicides must go to hell. It was maddening to worry about a person already dead and she couldn’t quite believe that God would add to the suffering of someone who had already suffered so much. To her the suicide had been an act of courage. To deny the self further existence when the self had been so rended. War waits to kill some.
She wanted to examine her religious beliefs and discard the ones that no longer made sense but it seemed difficult when she was this pregnant. She also perceived that to discard them wouldn’t be all that easy or simple. They were ingrained. When she was passionately religious as a young girl she read the Gospels over and over. By contrast the Old Testament was mean and foreboding. Why did King David so desire Bathsheba and send her husband away to be killed in battle? That seemed very mean-minded to her and Laura had agreed. And why did this great man peek at Bathsheba while she was bathing? This was definitely a sin she supposed. Even now she said her prayers before bed in the evening though they were quite abbreviated. She kept recalling her disappointment as a girl when she prayed that her parents would quit getting drunk and it hadn’t happened. She still believed devoutly in the Resurrection partly because it was such a glorious, magical idea to rise from the dead with the spike scars in your hands and feet. She knew that a belief in magic was quite common among her friends, even her Sunday school teacher who claimed to have seen several ghosts.
Now to Catherine the magic of life was in the spectacular assortment of species. Even at this moment she saw the nose of a muskrat rise above the surface of the pond. Hud also saw it and sitting beside her quivered with excitement but then he was thinking of a wild meal. She had read that some people ate muskrats from the river in Detroit, Michigan, but then she had also read that poor people in the Southwest ate donkeys during the Depression. Why God had decided not to stop her parents’ drinking was the early question that stuck with her. It seemed a simple request but then that was long before she knew anything about addiction. She herself had been truly drunk only once on her college graduation night and felt badly for three days which prevented her from doing it again. It had competed with the preposterous discomfort of being nearly nine months pregnant. She had read once about a woman who bore eighteen children which now seemed thoroughly incomprehensible even if she had been a cow.
Chapter 14
Catherine summoned Clyde one Sunday morning for a somewhat formal meeting on the farm after her walk. She needed him to spend more time around her place in case she fell and delivered the baby on the ground. The obstetrician had warned her to be more cautious about her walking for the time being.