T. Boyle - The Women

She shook her head, a long slow meditative roll from one shoulder to the other, and she held out her palms, splayed her thin fingers and opened up her face — not to John, but to him. “A judgment,” she whispered. “It a judgment. Dat what it is.”

He could see John go rigid. His son was about to throw it back at her, bully her, but he cut him off. “Hush, John,” he said. “Enough.”

Gertrude — that was her name, wasn’t it? — was staring down at her feet, bare feet, the nails neatly trimmed and glowing against the shadow of her skin, canescent almost, and there were traces of wet ash on her ankles and the pale underside of her arches. What she’d said had shocked him and he was struggling to recover himself. A judgment? That was what the press was calling it, the sermonizers and tub-thumpers, and for one hard moment he saw how wrong he’d been, how cruel and selfish. He’d lusted after Mamah. Thrown everything over. Ruined Kitty, ruined Edwin, alienated a whole community and spat in their faces. And here was the result of it, seven slain and a scared young black woman going to jail and maybe worse, Taliesin in ashes, Billy’s son dead and gone. And Mamah. And both her children. He wanted to deny it, wanted to call it fate, bad luck, anything, but the words wouldn’t come.

John couldn’t restrain himself any longer. “How dare you say that? ” he demanded, his voice fracturing with the rush of his emotions, his father’s protector, the golden walls, the forbidden city. “It was your husband. A maniac. A black—”

“No,” she said, and she was shaking her head again, long-faced and slow and mournful. “On me. It a judgment on me.” She lifted her eyes to him as if John weren’t even there. “That I should marry wit’ such a man—”

There was the sound of voices raised out in the yard, the heavy tramp of feet on the floorboards of the porch. A dog began to bark. He felt himself closing up again, angry suddenly — he was the victim here and it was all these others who were in the wrong because they wouldn’t allow a man to live in peace the way he saw fit. He wasn’t going to let God or his ministers or this scrawny Negro woman or anybody else dole out guilt because the onus was on them — they were the murderers, not he.

Her voice had broken. Her eyes clawed at him. “He was a good mon, sir, so good to me. We — I jus’ seventeen in Bridgetown and he say he love me, all the time he say he love me, and I don’t know what dat is, I don’t know, I still don’t know. .”

She was sobbing now, her chest heaving and both hands gone to her eyes. “A good mon,” she kept saying, “he was a good mon,” till John stepped forward to open the door on the deputy’s furious red face and the people crowding in behind him, strangers come to share in the outrage, and all he could think to say, the aggrieved victim, bereft and inconsolable, was “Take her away.” 178

At some point, his sister was there with something in a cup for him to drink and then she took him upstairs to the bedroom and laid him down on the bed by the darkened window, and for some strange reason, as she turned off the lamp and stood silhouetted in the light of the door, murmuring the sorts of things only women can command in times of heartache and affliction, he called her Kitty. “I’ll be all right, Kitty,” he said, though he knew he wouldn’t be, and as he lay there sleepless, listening to the voices in the dark and the breathless haunted groans of the two survivors laid out in the parlor (Fritz, who would recover from his burns and a forearm shattered in his plunge through the window, and Lindblom, who would die by morning), she began to emerge from the shadows, Kitty, not Mamah, and wasn’t that the strangest thing? He saw her whirling away from him in the blue satin gown her mother had made her, Cosette to his Marius, and half the girls there were Cosette while the boys favored Valjean and Javert, Kitty, with the elastic limbs and the red-gold hair that piled up like waves on a beach. .

In the morning, the sun rose out of the hills in a dark bruise of clouds and the clouds spread over the valley like a stain in water. By noon, it was like dusk. He felt the humidity the moment he rose from his sweated sheets, heavy air bearing him down and his shirt wet before he put it on. He’d fallen into a dreamless sleep sometime in the early hours, listening to a solitary bird — a whip-poor-will — riding up and down the glissando of its liquid notes till he’d gone unconscious along with it. He didn’t know how long he’d slept, but when he woke he was fully and immediately present. He knew where he was and why he’d come and that his loss and misery were continuous and that he wouldn’t taste his breakfast or his lunch or his dinner either.

He tried to comb his hair, but it was a snarl, and when he lifted his arms to smooth it back he was assaulted by his own odor. He smelled of yesterday’s sweat, a deep working stench of fear and uncertainty that no soap or eau de cologne could ever drive down. For a moment he thought of going down to the lake for a swim, but that wouldn’t be right either, not if Mamah couldn’t join him or her John and her Martha — no, he would wear his odor, deepen it with the sweat of digging, the pickaxe riding high over his head as he stabbed at the earth and loosened the teeth of the yellow rock that lay clustered there along the black gums of the soil, because every grave was a mouth that opened and closed and swallowed till there was nothing left.

There was breakfast. A hush of voices, people tiptoeing round the house like ghosts of the departed. He sat for a moment with Fritz — the hair gone, the scalded scalp, gauze pillowed up like a spring snowstorm — but the boy didn’t seem to recognize him. Then he went out into the yard to smell the thin poisonous odor of the smoke that still rose from the ruins across the way, and there were people here as well, too many people, and so he walked down the hill and back up again to Taliesin and into the burned-out courtyard. That was where Billy Weston was, both his hands bandaged and a white surgical strip wrapped round his skull so that he looked like a casualty of the war. Frank saw the blood there, a slow seep of it accumulating at the temple, a wound that would never heal. “Billy,” was all he could say, and Billy, a rake in one hand, the streaming hose in the other, could only nod in return. For a long while they just stood there, side by side, and then they bent forward and began to rake the ashes.

In another place, all the way across the world in Paris, where the talk was of nothing but the war — the insuperability of Plan 17, the fierceness of the French cavalry and the defects of the German character — Maude Miriam Noel was just sitting down to breakfast at the Café Lilac. She’d chosen a table under the awning, out of the sun, though the day was lovely, so tranquil and warm you’d never know a war was going on not a hundred and fifty kilometers away. It was her skin. She’d been out for a walk along the Seine the day before, and though she was wearing her hat and carrying a parasol, she hadn’t bothered with gloves because of the heat, and now the backs of her hands were red — or worse, brown. She’d rubbed cold cream on them, but she couldn’t help noticing the faint rippling of the flesh there — wrinkles, they were wrinkles — and that worried her, worried her deeply. Old women had wrinkled hands, parchment hands (“Lizard skin,” as Leora used to joke all those years ago when they were both young and could barely conceive of what a wrinkle was, at least in relation to themselves), and she wasn’t an old woman. Not in fact or by any stretch of the imagination. Men stopped to stare at her as she went down the street, and not simply men of middle age, but young men too.