“Don’t pester me and you won’t have to hear it.” He went back to his paper. She looked at him for a moment. He was still handsome, with his thick dark hair falling over his forehead and his dark eyes. Solace favored him. When they had made her, lying together in their marriage bed, had she loved him? One edge of his newspaper half fell over a painted iron trivet he had won for her, at a shooting gallery at the Sacandaga Amusement Park. He had been home on leave, full of stories about New York City and the South, looking like a million dollars in his uniform. Hadn’t she loved him then?
She turned back to her dishes. She rested her reddened hands on the curved white edge of the sink and looked at her wedding band. He had wrestled it onto her finger in Justice Kendrick’s parlor, with Mrs. Kendrick pumping out “Abide with Me” on their little organ and her best friend, Patsy, giggling with his brother David. She must have loved him then. She wished she could feel it now, feel something to go with the memories, instead of this blank incredulity that sent her searching for evidence that yes, once upon a time, she had loved the intimate stranger at her kitchen table.
“The dam’s finished up,” he said.
She was surprised he spoke. “I’d heard.”
“Two days now, it’s been filling up. Soon, it’ll all be gone.” The tone in his voice made her turn around. “The hayfield. The beanfield. Lord, I used to love that field in the spring, all the flowers peeping out. I wonder if the water rushes in fast or rises slow.” He looked into some middle distance that only he could see. “I wonder if people’s stuff comes floating by. You know, stuff that got left behind, not worth taking.”
She turned back to the sink and grabbed another blue willow plate. “Anything in people’s houses or barns got burnt down. You know that.”
“Our barn could be knee deep in water right now.”
“There’s no barn left.”
“Remember how the boys used to swing from that rope I hung on the cross-beam? Imagine ’em swinging back and forth and then letting go into the water.”
She whirled, water splattering from the plate in her hand. “Don’t talk about that! There isn’t any barn there anymore!”
His eyes were spooky-empty, looking at things he had no business looking at. “A ghost barn,” he said. “For ghost children.” His voice broke on the last word.
She slammed the plate down so hard it rang. “Stop it! It’s no good talking about it!”
“Why not?” He raised his head to her. “Why not?” He cracked the paper against the edge of the table. “Why can’t we talk about it?” He stood up, racking his chair back. “It’s all gone. Everything I ever worked for and wanted. Dead and gone, and all you can talk about is me joining up with some goddamned road crew.”
“Because we’ve got to move on,” she said. She turned back to the sink so he wouldn’t see the hot blur in her eyes. She slid the skillet into the soapy water and scrubbed at it unseeing. “It doesn’t do any good to talk about what was. It just makes us feel bad.”
“I feel bad all the time, anyway,” he said. “I used to be a father. I used to be a farmer. Maybe you don’t want to remember. But I do. Remembering about it is all I’ve got.”
She scrubbed the dish towel against her eyes and dashed it to the counter. “You’re still a father, you jackass, unless you’ve forgotten that little girl upstairs.” She turned to face him. “And you could be a farmer again. There’s land around here going begging from the bank. Use some of the money and buy it!”
“No!” His voice felt like a blow to her stomach. “Not a penny of it. I’m not touching that money, and neither are you.”
“Why not?” She jutted her chin forward, refusing to let him scare her. “You certainly earned it.”
His hand jerked up and she flinched. They both looked at it, at the knotted bulges where his first two fingers had been broken and never set right. He lowered it to his side. “You blame me, don’t you.”
She shook her head.
“You do. I see you sometimes, looking at me. Thinking it’s my fault.”
“Then you’re a fool. It’s as much my fault as yours. Don’t you think I don’t lie awake nights, blaming myself? Going over and over everything? What I should have done, what I would have done?”
“You hate me.”
“No.”
“You hate me. Admit it.”
“No.”
He lunged forward and dug his fingers into her arms. “Say it! You hate me! Say it!”
“All right then!” she screamed. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate me!” She tore out of his grasp and clapped her hand over her mouth, her heart thudding, the echo of her words ringing through the kitchen.
He nodded, as if he had proved something to his satisfaction. “That night, when they were so sick. We should have been willing to die for them. If I had known, I would have given my life to save them. But we didn’t know. That it was the end. Of all our lives.”
“It wasn’t the end.” She was gasping now, her breath coming in high, hard pants. She thought she ought to bend over and put her head between her knees, but she was afraid. Afraid of what he’d do.
“It’s like a curse.” His eyes were gone again, his gaze somewhere over her head. “First the children, then the farm. There’s nothing left of my life.”
She sucked in another breath. “Well there’s plenty left of my life. Solace.”
“Solace,” he said. “My poor baby girl. Having to take the place of all her brothers and sisters. What kind of life is that for a kid?”
She thought she had been afraid before. Now she felt frozen with fear, every nerve in her body strung tight and screaming, as if she had dropped without warning into an icy lake.
“You leave her out of this,” she managed to say.
He turned to her, slowly, like he was working things out in his head. “What kind of life is this for any of us? You and me hating and aching and scared. And Solace. Even her name tells her she’s just a makeup for the others. The third-place ribbon.” He focused on her, really focused on her, for the first time since she had screamed at him. “Wouldn’t you like a little peace, Janie? Just to lay down and not feel any pain anymore?”
“No.” She was shaking. “Solace needs me.”
He waved her answer off. “All of us.”
She braced her hands against the sink and pushed herself forward. “I won’t let you hurt her.” She had failed before, in the call to lay down her life for her children, but she wouldn’t fail this time. “I swear to God, I’ll die before I’ll let you hurt her.”
He looked appalled. “I wouldn’t hurt her.” She felt a shock of relief rush through her, warm and liquid, until he said, “I don’t want to hurt any of us. I want the hurting to stop.”
“No!” She launched herself at him, punching and hitting, but he wrapped her in his big arms, strong from years of yoking and plowing and haying and baling, and for a moment, her body remembered what it had felt like, him holding her at the end of a long day.
“Think, Janie!” His voice was hot and hissing in her ears. “Who’s to say it couldn’t happen again? Do you want Solace to suffer like they suffered?”
“Get out,” she said, her voice squeezed from where he was crushing her ribs. “Get out of this house.”
“And if not by disease, how then? Run over by a car like the McGonnegal boy? Burnt alive like that little girl up Cossayuharie way? Or maybe she’ll grow up to die having children, or eaten up inside by a cancer. Don’t you see, Janie?” His voice grewvery small, a tiny snake slithering into a dark hole. “We’re all dead already.”
Oh God, she thought. Oh God oh God oh God.
“I don’t want to hurt you. Will you promise to be still?”
She nodded.
“Are you scared?”
She nodded.
“Don’t be. I’ll hold you. And we can stop hating each other. I’m so sick of it. Sick to death of it.”