Jane Smiley - Early Warning

“You weren’t silly, Ma, you were beautiful.”

“Was I?” she whispered. Then she shook her head. But she was still smiling — at the memory, he hoped. Henry put his hand on her temple, gently. He could feel the dry thinness of the skin of her forehead, and with his fingertip, he could feel the vein quiver in her temple, and then he could not feel it anymore. He waited. After a minute or two, he placed his palm over her eyelids and closed them.

Dear Jesse—

I think I told you about a kid I knew in the army — he was from Oklahoma, but I met him at Fort Leonard Wood, which is down in the Ozarks. Now, I was a pretty good shot, but this kid was a phenom. I had a sergeant there at Fort Leonard Wood, and he was such a perfect and complete sort of sergeant that I don’t remember his name. Anyway, he’d heard about snipers in the marines. He wanted to toughen Lyman and me up, so one day, he took us down to a river that ran through a remote part of the base, and he got us to strip down, carry our weapons into the river, and look out for game in the trees or on the banks. We were supposed to go along for an hour — he would meet us downstream and see what we got. The key was to move as quietly as possible. Lyman thought he was going to shoot himself some catfish, maybe, and he did get a beaver, and I got a raccoon on the shore. Lyman, who was very observant, then pointed out that there was a cottonmouth swimming right along with us, about ten feet away. Now, I’d seen a cottonmouth or two, and they usually ran maybe three feet, but this one was nearly five feet long and as big around as your arm — an old fellow and wily. I thought I would shoot it, but Lyman wanted to watch it, so we slowed down and kept our eyes open. Pretty soon, the snake crossed our path and slithered up on the right-hand shore, where it did something I never saw a snake do before, it slithered over to the carcass of a deer and began to eat it. We didn’t kill the snake, in the end — while we were watching the snake feed, Lyman noticed a bobcat peer out at the snake and the deer from behind a tree. We stood in the water and waited, and after a few moments, the bobcat eased out, his teeth bared and his hackles raised. I’m guessing he thought he could scare the snake away from what might have been his kill. But as soon as it emerged and slid two steps toward the deer, Lyman pulled the trigger and shot the bobcat. The snake coiled up quick and started looking around and opening his mouth — that’s why it’s called a cottonmouth, it’s got white inside its mouth. Lyman, I know, could have shot it in the head. But he didn’t, and he wouldn’t let me. I guess he sympathized with it, and respected it for getting so big and old. Lyman was the soldier who stepped on a mine in Italy — it took us four hours to carry him down the mountain. He lost his leg in the end, but he came home, which many others did not.

Got to go,

Uncle Frank

—

IN THE SPRING, almost six months after the funeral, Lillian drove from McLean to Denby to clean out the house. She could see concern flicker across their features as she said to Arthur, and then to Debbie (who was four months’ pregnant), that she didn’t want any company — such a long trip, was it safe, where would she stop — but she shook her head decisively. She had already written Minnie, Lois, and Claire, using the words “Don’t touch anything,” and they had not, though Claire wrote back, “It is such a black hole of stuff, are you sure?”

“Don’t touch anything.”

But it was a way of preserving the house for a few months, because Joe and Frank were clear: the house had to come down. Two of the basement walls were bowing inward, and the TV room was separating from the main structure. The stairs had never been up to code — like climbing a ladder, how Walter, or Rosanna at her age, had…

“Don’t touch anything.”

So they didn’t touch anything, and though it was dusk and a long way from South Bend, where she had spent the previous night, Lillian drove into the old driveway and parked. She had forgotten the house would be dark; Joe had, of course, shut off the electricity. She was a little struck by its air of being a solid object. Joe had made sure that nothing happened to it. Wasn’t that a frightening thing from her childhood in the Depression — abandoned houses with the windows smashed, and then the birds got in and built nests, and the wasps and bees. But Joe would never allow anything like that.

She opened her car door and put her foot in a rut in the driveway. Running along the east end of the house was the bed of daffodils, now finished, and among them the first green spears of tulip leaves thrusting upward. Back in Virginia, they were already through tulips, and even the irises were tall, though they hadn’t blossomed. Magnolias. Her mother had never gotten a magnolia tree to grow here. She got out of the car and closed the door and waited in the silence for a few more seconds, though what she was waiting for, she had no idea.

Henry said only that Rosanna seemed more than fine when she arrived in Chicago: talkative, and pleased with herself. Went in to take a rest, which was certainly understandable — it was a long drive — and then he had heard something but he didn’t know what. At the funeral, everyone had agreed, what a good death, you had to go sometime, she had retained her faculties to the end, and she had eaten whatever she pleased whenever she pleased. In short, life was doing what you wanted to do in the way you wanted to do it, and may she rest in peace. Even this new Pastor Campbell, supposedly quite strict, had stood there at the pulpit and talked about Rosanna’s showing evidence of God’s grace in her generosity of spirit. Then they laid her next to Walter, and soon they would tear down the house, fill in the foundation, plow the field, and plant the beans; there was a completeness to it that Lillian knew her mother would have considered right and just. No one, not even the dead person herself, minded this death as much as Lillian did. She went up the stairs and opened the door (when had it ever been locked?).

Lillian’s eyes adjusted, and she saw how Rosanna had left the room, the afghan folded over the back of the sofa, the September issue of McCall’s on the side table, the TV Guide on top of it, dated the week of September 30. Beside the sofa, Rosanna’s basket of yarn, half-skeins and balled-up remnants in pinks and blues on the top. Thrust among them was a pattern book open to a pineapple-lace pattern. Lillian couldn’t knit a twenty-stitch row without dropping five stitches, but Debbie had already knitted the baby two hats, a pair of booties, and a blanket. And her husband, Hugh, the only handy intellectual Lillian had ever seen, was building a cradle based on a model from Amish country. Hugh’s specialty was the history of Dutch Reformed settlement in America, which was why, Lillian thought, he could build and think at the same time. But he was systematic and literal-minded, and though he loved Debbie very much, Lillian had hoped her daughter would end up with someone handsomer and more romantic, someone, in fact, more like Arthur. Tina had a boyfriend, too — another art student, who specialized in giant paintings of galaxies, where each dot of paint represented a star. Tina had explained to Lillian that impossibility was the sign of art. She herself was doing collages of torn food packaging made to look like animals.

The darkness wasn’t dark anymore. Lillian sat down in the rocking chair and gazed around the room. She suddenly remembered Rosanna sitting in this very chair, also at twilight, softly singing the song that Lillian knew from her earliest days was “her” song—“God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall.” “He paints the lily of the field, / Perfumes each lily bell; / If He so loves the little flow’rs, / I know He loves me well.” In those days, Rosanna had had a light, tuneful voice, and Lillian had asked for it over and over, as children do. Now she hummed it, and realized that she had lived an unusual life for only one reason, and that reason was that she’d known true love from the day she was born. Then she handed herself off, as if by instinct, to Arthur, passing through town, and he had also loved her truly and faithfully.