Robert Goolrick: A Reliable Wife

They came to the pond, and Antonio skidded out onto the ice and stood like a bull in the ring, wounded, bleeding, tears still running down his face. There was no more fight in him. He had come to the end of his strength, the end of his hatred, the end of his regret, and he stood in the center of the pond, on the black ice, waiting to be killed. He thought of the days in heaven, he thought of his reunion with his mother, he thought of the incredible pain of dying, the physical pain the body could stand before it gave out, until the irrevocable blow was mercifully given and darkness fell.

Ralph paused at the edge of the pond. He was bleeding, too, from a cut on his head, and his hands were broken, the pain shooting up his arms. He found too that his anger had spent itself, that while the unforgivable things were still unforgivable, and the terror still terrifying, he had no more stomach for the rest. He thought of the accounts in the newspaper, the suicides, the murders, and the corpses, and he found that the living were more beautiful than the dead, that in the end, something must be saved, even if that meant it also had to be endured. Antonio would go away. Antonio would never be seen again and would die alone with his guilt and shame and memories, but there would be no corpse to carry to the graveyard, not today. There would be no white, still flesh in his house, not anymore. He would mourn his loss, but he would, in secret, still love his son and send him money, and when he died, the son would be sent for, and would stand by his father’s grave and remember this day as though it had happened to somebody else a long time ago.

Then they heard the crack. A white jagged line shot through the black ice and Antonio went down, into the icy water, under the ice. He came up under the ice, no air to breathe, his head hitting, his blood mingling with the black water.

Antonio struggled, but he couldn’t see his way out, and he floated into unconsciousness, into the peaceful cold of the black water, his body showing dimly beneath the surface of the ice.

Ralph Truitt howled in pain, and he tried to get out to his boy, but the ice gave way around him and he floundered in the frigid water. He ran to the barn where he found a pole and a rope, and he raced back to the water, trying to save him, trying to save the years and the days, not knowing or admitting that Antonio was already dead, already gone, the plumes of blood now visible under the ice, surrounding his dead body, floating, arms at his sides as though he were flying, head down as though he were looking from a great height on the small earth beneath him.

The pole and the rope were useless, and as his son lay all night under the ice, Ralph was inconsolable. He slept alone. He wouldn’t speak. He ate nothing.

Catherine couldn’t sleep. She walked the halls of the huge house, looking at the pictures, running her hands over the furniture, finally going into Antonio’s rooms and packing up his things in trunks. She stripped the sheets from his bed and smelled in them the rich scent of her old lover, and she wept until there weren’t any more tears. Then, finally, she went and lay down on the narrow bed in the perfect playroom and slept.

They had to get men to come in the morning from town and pull Antonio from the water, his pristine shirt still bravely white over his chest. He was long and narrow and light as a boy. His black hair lay back in the cart as they pulled him away, and it froze to his scalp in the morning light and the warming wind.

Ralph would have forgiven him. He would have taken his son in his arms and said, hush, hush now, it’s over now. There is no more to happen, no more that can happen. The story, the old story has come to an end. He would have put his mouth to his son’s and breathed over and over until the warm breath filled his son’s lungs, and his son’s eyes opened and looked at him and trusted him.

But there was no use. There was no point. It was just a story. It was just a story of people, of Ralph and Emilia and Antonio and Catherine and the mothers and the fathers who had died, too soon or late, of people who had hurt one another as much as people can do, who had been selfish and not wise, and had become trapped inside the bitter walls of memories they wished they had never had.

It was just a story of how the bitter cold gets into your bones and never leaves you, of how the memories get into your heart and never leave you alone, of the pain and the bitterness of what happens to you when you’re small and have no defenses but still know evil when it happens, of secrets about evil you have no one to tell, of the life you live in secret, knowing your own pain and the pain of others but helpless to do anything other than the things you do, and the end it all comes to.

It was a story of a son who felt his one true birthright was to kill his father. It was the story of a father who could not undo a single gesture of his life, no matter the sympathies of his heart. It was a story of poison, poison that causes you to weep in your sleep, that comes to you first as a taste of ecstasy. It was a story of people who don’t choose life over death until it’s too late to know the difference, people whose goodness is forgotten, left behind like a child’s toy in a dusty playroom, people who see many things and remember only a handful of them and learn from even fewer, people who hurt themselves, who wreck their own lives and then go on to wreck the lives of those around them, who cannot be helped or assuaged by love or kindness or luck or charm, who forget kindness, the feeling and practice of it, and how it can save even the worst, most misshapen life from despair.

It was just a story about despair.

The funeral was only the three of them, Truitt and Catherine and Mrs. Larsen. Truitt had dug the hole himself, spending a long day breaking up the thawing earth. There were no tears. There was a minister from one of the churches, and Antonio was buried with the fewest possible words next to his sister and Ralph’s mother and father, near the old house.

His coffin seemed so large to Catherine. It was impossible to believe that his beautiful body was shut inside it, locked away from the light and the air forever. “Every thing in the light and air ought to be happy,” the poet had said. “Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.” She felt the giddy sense of being alive in the presence of the dead.

Two days had passed. She stood now in the ruins of the garden she hoped to build. The high walls cut off her view of the rest of the world; there was still snow in the corners of the garden, and the fallen statues were glazed with ice. It seemed ten degrees colder here than in the rest of the world, although the back of the house was splendid in the western sun. She could barely remember how all this had begun.

She had wanted something, and she had set out to get it, clear of her purpose and sure in her actions. But it had gotten confused, confused in the mass of the ordinary, confused in the way people live, in the way the heart attracts and repels the things it wants and fears. Her own heart had gone out in directions she never imagined, her hopes had become pinned to the things she would never have allowed.

She wore the blue wool dress she had been finishing when Antonio died. His hands had felt the cloth around her body. She stood, severe and simple, in the middle of an old garden in the hidden back of a remarkable house. Antonio was dead. A whole life was dead to her.

She had no idea how it would turn out. Truitt had not spoken to her since the death, and she had not interfered with his profound grief. They ate together at the long table, but there was no discussion, no reading of poetry after supper, no sumptuous feast of flesh in the dark. She had picked for herself a small and insignificant bedroom, and retired there to weep in private for all she had lost.