Jodie Picoult - Songs of the Humpback Whale - A Novel in Five Voices

“Start anywhere,” Joley says. “It’ll come to center.”

“I can tell you this.” A nervous laugh. “I didn’t leave because I had thought long and hard about it. I left on impulse. Just like that.” I snap my fingers. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

“What made you hit Oliver, then?” Joley smiles. “Don’t get me wrong. Not that I don’t think it was a wonderful idea.”

“You know the textbook answer to that. Abused child grows up to be an abuser herself. I’ve been thinking so much about Daddy lately. It’s classic, isn’t it? The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children?”

Joley stretches my hand out on the leg of his jeans. “Do you think he’s on his way here?”

“I give him ten days at most.” I twirl my wedding band, which I am still wearing, to my own surprise. “Unless of course he just decided to take off to South America like he had planned. In which case I get a grace period of a month.”

“I hate to admit it myself, but you used to love him.”

Joley comes to the heart of the matter faster than anyone I know. “I loved the idea of being in love with him,” I say, “but that can be a poor substitute for a life.” I stare at my brother. “I already told you this isn’t about Oliver. It’s about me. I just snapped when we were having that fight. I mean, we were arguing about whether shoe boxes or files should go in my closet. That doesn’t ruin a marriage.” I look into my lap. “I’m scared. I’ve spent fifteen years cutting up fruit the way Oliver likes it, folding his laundry, wiping clean his messes. I’ve done everything that I was supposed to. I don’t know what made me hit him that day. Maybe it was just a way out.”

“Is that what you’ve been looking for?”

“I don’t know what I’m looking for.” I sigh. “I got married young. I had a baby young. So when people asked me who I was, I’d answer by saying ‘a wife,’ or ‘a mother.’ I can’t tell you at all what I’m like, what Jane is like.”

Joley’s eyes do not leave my face. “What is it you want?”

I close my eyes, and try to picture it. “Oh, Joley,” I say, “I’ll go home and be the ideal wife, the perfect mother. I’ll do everything I’ve been doing and I won’t ever bring this up again. I’ll live the most ordinary life there ever was, just as long as you promise me that I’ll get five minutes of wonderful before it’s all over.”

From the beginning there’s friction. I know she’s coming, but I’m not looking forward to it, and sure enough she shows up just when I’m in the middle of shearing. So I see her get out of the car with the little girl, but I pretend I haven’t heard her drive up. I am working the ram when she comes into the pen. I can’t tell much about her because I am facing the sheep, except that she has pretty good legs. I try to concentrate on running straight rows of fleece, on peeling the wool back from the sheep’s side like filleting a bass. Good wool is seventy-five cents per pound these days, belly wool goes for something cheaper. When my mother was alive she’d card and spin it, and then knit something out of it: a sweater, an afghan. But these days we just sell the fleece to the town pool. From time to time, I’ll buy one of the blankets they weave from everyone’s sheep.

She’s stepping around on the hay like it’s a mine field. For Christ’s sake, it’s just manure. Half the vegetables she eats at the supermarket have probably been mulched with the stuff. She asks me if I know Joley.

Maybe I shouldn’t give her such a hard time. After all, I don’t really know her. What I’m going on is an assumption. Still, I can’t resist. Just because I want to watch her out of her element, I ask her to help me get the next ewe, and she follows me into the barn. I’m figuring on a good laugh, and then I’ll tell her who I am.

She follows my actions, digging into the fleece like she is knotting her fingers into a net, and we walk slowly, hunched, with the sheep between us. She follows me out to the ledge where I’ve been doing the shearing. I steal a look at her, then, impressed. She isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, at least. She has a high forehead and a little nose that goes up at the end, like it’s too small for her face. I wouldn’t call her a knockout, but she’s all right. In a fresh, just-washed way. Of course, I’m not seeing her all done up. Back where she’s from, she probably wears all that makeup and chunky jewelry and suits with crazy angles.

I have to keep myself from smiling: she’s doing a good job. I let go of the sheep to grab the razor and all of a sudden the ewe bolts, heading straight for the girl. “What are you doing!” I yell, the first thing that comes to mind. “Catch her!”

The girl-Rebecca, that’s her name-dives for the sheep but it runs in the opposite direction. I turn to Joley’s sister. I absolutely can’t believe someone would be stupid enough to let go of a sheep before shearing.

“I thought it would just stay put,” she says.

All it takes is common sense, for God’s sake. She looks up at me with this apologetic gaze and when she sees that isn’t going to work she runs after the sheep herself. She lunges for the ewe, but doesn’t see the manure heaped onto the hay. Naturally, she falls, smack in the middle of it.

I didn’t mean for anything like this to happen, honest. I expected to have a little fun with her, make the ol’ Newton girl see what a working farm is really like, and then I was going to take her down to Joley. But now that it’s happened, really, it’s a riot. To keep myself from laughing, I catch the sheep and throw all my attention into shearing her. I rub the shears up the belly, across the hinds, between the legs, around the neck. I use my legs and knees to pin her on her side while I run the shears over her flanks, letting the wool roll off like a carpet of snow. It’s perfect, from the inside, white with only a few spots of lanolin. It springs back at the touch, crimped with natural oils from the skin. In a few minutes when I am finished with the sheep, I slap her lightly on her hind leg. She springs up, looking back at me once, a little angry. She bolts away, down into the field with the other sheep.

I walk over to where Joley’s sister is rubbing her back up against the split rail. She’s doing everything she can to keep from touching the stuff. That does it for me; I laugh in her face. She smells awful; even her hair is encrusted with manure. “Tough break,” I say. What I really mean is: I’m sorry.

She looks so out of place and incredibly miserable that I rediscover my conscience. I’m about to tell her who I am, and how I didn’t really mean for this to happen, when she undergoes this transformation. It’s a physical thing-her shoulders square up and her chin lifts and her eyes get very dark. All of a sudden she has this attitude. “I’m sure this isn’t appropriate behavior for a field hand,” she tells me. “When I tell Joley about this, he’ll report you to the person who runs the place.”

“I’m not too worried about that,” I say dryly and I tell her who I am. I hold out my hand, and then on second thought, take it back. The girl introduces herself. She’s laughing, which makes me think she’ll turn out all right. “Come on,” I say. “You can get cleaned up at the Big House.”

I show them their rooms, figuring it’s the least I can do after that fiasco, and tell Jane she’s welcome to the clothes my mother left in her closet. They’ll be big, but she can figure it out. She near about slams the bedroom door in my face, and I walk downstairs to Rebecca again, who’s peeking into each of the drawers of an antique apothecary chest that came from my mother’s mother. “Nothing in there,” I say, catching her in the act.