Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“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 thenext 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 hedidn’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.”

“He’ll be back.”

“Just like my daddy,” I said. “Livvy, your father’s gone, we’ll never see him again.”

“Stop that,” Mama said. “You don’t know how much sticks in their minds. You mind what you say in front of her.”

“But it’s true.”

“It’s not,” she said. “You won’t lose him that easy. He’ll be back.”

In the afternoonI took Livia with me while I picked pole beans and summer squash. Then we went back to the pear and apple orchard and played in the shade. After a while I took her over to Grandma Yount’s grave. We’ll all be here someday, I wanted to say, your grandma and your daddy and your mama, too. And you’ll be here when your time comes. This is our land, this is where we all end up.

I might have said this, it wouldn’t hurt for her to hear it, but for what Mama said. I guess it’s true you don’t know what sticks in their minds, or what they’ll make of it.

She liked it out there, Livia did. She crawled right up to Grandma Yount’s stone and ran her hand over it. You’d have thought she was trying to read it that way, like a blind person with Braille.

He didn’t comehome for dinner. It was going on ten when I heard the car on the gravel. Mama and I were watching television. I got up and went into the kitchen to be there when he came in.

He was sober. He stood in the doorway and looked at me. Every emotion a man could have was there on his face.

“Look at you,” he said. “I did that to you.”

My face was worse than the day before. Bruises and swellings are like that, taking their time to ripen.

“You missed dinner,” I said, “but I saved some for you. I’ll heat up a plate for you.”

“I already ate. Tildie, I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“No,” he said. “That’s not right. We have to talk.”

We slipped up to our room, leaving Mama to the television set. With our door closed we talked about the patterns we were caught in and how we seemed to have no control, like actors in a play with all their lines written for them by someone else. We could improvise, we could invent movements and gestures, we could read our lines in any of a number of ways, but the script was all written down and we couldn’t get away from it.

I mentioned counseling. He said, “I called that place in Fulton City. I wouldn’t tell them my name. Can you feature that? I called them for help but I was too ashamed to tell them my name.”

“What did they say?”

“They would want to see us once a week as a couple, and each of us individually once a week. Total price for the three sessions would be eighty dollars.”

“For how long?”

“I asked. They couldn’t say. They said it’s not the sort of change you can expect to make overnight.”

I said, “Eighty dollars a week. We can’t afford that.”

“I had the feeling they might reduce it some.”

“Did you make an appointment?”

“No. I thought I’d call tomorrow.”

“I don’t want to cut the trees,” I said. He looked at me. “To pay for it. I don’t want to cut Mama’s walnut trees.”

“Tildie, who brought up the damn trees?”

“We could sell the table,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”