Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“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 restof 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.

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 itwas 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.”