Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

The steady slope of the lane ran on for nearly a mile, then turned into a bumpy trail leading to a forlorn house with broken-down steps and a litter of rubbish around them. The boy hung back more and more, and stopped short when the haggard, long-toothed woman in the gray dress came out carrying a stick of stove wood. The woman stopped short too, when she recognized Rosaleen, and a sly cold look came on her face.

“Good day,” said Rosaleen. “Your boy saw a ghost in the road last night, and I didn’t have the heart to send him out in the darkness. He slept safe in my house.”

The woman gave a sharp dry bark, like a fox. “Ghosts!” she said. “From all I hear, there’s more than ghosts around your house nights, Missis O’Toole.” She wagged her head and her faded tan hair flew in strings. “A pretty specimen you are, Missis O’Toole, with your old husband and the young boys in your house and the travelling salesmen and the drunkards lolling on your doorstep all hours—”

“Hold your tongue before your lad here,” said Rosaleen, the back of her neck beginning to crinkle. She was so taken by surprise she couldn’t find a ready answer, but stood in her tracks listening.

“A pretty sight you are, Missis O’Toole,” said the woman, raising her thin voice somewhat, but speaking with deadly cold slowness. “With your trips away from your husband and your loud colored dresses and your dyed hair—”

“May God strike you dead,” said Rosaleen, raising her own voice suddenly. “If you say that of my hair! And for the rest may your evil tongue rot in your head with your teeth! I’ll not waste words on ye! Here’s your poor lad and may God pity him in your house, a blight on it! And if my own house is burnt over my head I’ll know who did it!” She turned away and whirled back to call out, “May ye be ten years dying!”

“You can curse and swear, Missis O’Toole, but the whole countryside knows about you!” cried the other, brandishing her stick like a spear.

“Much good they’ll get out of it!” shouted Rosaleen, striding away in a roaring fury. “Dyed, is it?” She raised her clinched fist and shook it at the world. “Oh, the liar!” and her rage was like a drum beating time for her marching legs. What was happening these days that everybody she met had dirty minds and dirty tongues in their heads? Oh, why wasn’t she strong enough to strangle them all at once? Her eyes were so hot she couldn’t close her lids over them, but went on staring and walking, until almost before she knew it she came in sight of her own house, sitting like a hen quietly in a nest of snow. She slowed down, her thumping heart eased a little, and she sat on a stone by the roadside to catch her breath and gather her wits before she must see Dennis. As she sat, it came to her that the Evil walking the roads at night in this place was the bitter lies people had been telling about her, who had been a good woman all this time when many another would have gone astray. It was no comfort now to remember all the times she might have done wrong and didn’t. What was the good if she was being scandalized all the same? That lad in Boston now — the little whelp. She spat on the frozen earth and wiped her mouth. Then she put her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, and thought, “So that’s the way it is here, is it? That’s what my life has come to, I’m a woman of bad fame with the neighbors.”

Dwelling on this strange thought, little by little she began to feel better. Jealousy, of course, that was it. “Ah, what wouldn’t that poor thing give to have my hair?” and she patted it tenderly. From the beginning it had been so, the women were jealous, because the men were everywhere after her, as if it was her fault! Well, let them talk. Let them. She knew in her heart what she was, and Dennis knew, and that was enough.

“Life is a dream,” she said aloud, in a soft easy melancholy. “It’s a mere dream.” The thought and the words pleased her, and she gazed with pleasure at the loosened stones of the wall across the road, dark brown, with the thin shining coat of ice on them, in a comfortable daze until her feet began to feel chilled.

“Let me not sit here and take my death at my early time of life,” she cautioned herself, getting up and wrapping her shawl carefully around her. She was thinking how this sad countryside needed some young hearts in it, and how she wished Kevin would come back to laugh with her at that woman up the hill; with him, she could just laugh in their faces! That dream about Honora now, it hadn’t come true at all. Maybe the dream about Kevin wasn’t true either. If one dream failed on you it would be foolish to think another mightn’t fail you too: wouldn’t it, wouldn’t it? She smiled at Dennis sitting by the stove.

“What did the native people have to say this morning?” he asked, trying to pretend it was nothing much to him what they said.

“Oh, we exchanged the compliments of the season,” said Rosaleen. “There was no call for more.” She went about singing; her heart felt light as a leaf and she couldn’t have told why if she died for it. But she was a good woman and she’d show them she was going to be one to her last day. Ah, she’d show them, the low-minded things.

In the evening they settled down by the stove, Dennis cleaning and greasing his boots, Rosaleen with the long tablecloth she’d been working on for fifteen years. Dennis kept wondering what had happened in Boston, or where ever she had been. He knew he would never hear the straight of it, but he wanted Rosaleen’s story about it. And there she sat mum, putting a lot of useless stitches in something she would never use, even if she ever finished it, which she would not.

“Dennis,” she said after a while. “I don’t put the respect on dreams I once did.”

“That’s maybe a good thing,” said Dennis, cautiously. “And why don’t you?”

“All day long I’ve been thinking Kevin isn’t dead at all, and we shall see him in this very house before long.”

Dennis growled in his throat a little. “That’s no sign at all,” he said. And to show that he had a grudge against her he laid down his meerschaum pipe, stuffed his old briar and lit it instead. Rosaleen took no notice at all. Her embroidery had fallen on her knees and she was listening to the rattle and clatter of a buggy coming down the road, with Richards’s voice roaring a song, “I’ve been working on the railroad, All the live-long day!” She stood up, taking hair pins out and putting them back, her hands trembling. Then she ran to the looking-glass and saw her face there, leaping into shapes fit to scare you. “Oh, Dennis,” she cried out as if it was that thought had driven her out of her chair. “I forgot to buy a looking-glass, I forgot it altogether!”

“It’s a good enough glass,” repeated Dennis. The buggy clattered at the gate, the song halted. Ah, he was coming in, surely! It flashed through her mind a woman would have a ruined life with such a man, it was courting death and danger to let him set foot over the threshold.

She stopped herself from running to the door, hand on the knob even before his knock sounded. Then the wheels creaked and ground again, the song started up; if he thought of stopping he changed his mind and went on, off on his career to the Saturday night dance in Winston, with his rapscallion cronies.

Rosaleen didn’t know what to expect, then, and then: surely he couldn’t be stopping? Ah, surely he couldn’t be going on? She sat down again with her heart just nowhere, and took up the tablecloth, but for a long time she couldn’t see the stitches. She was wondering what had become of her life; every day she had thought something great was going to happen, and it was all just straying from one terrible disappointment to another. Here in the lamplight sat Dennis and the cats, beyond in the darkness and snow lay Winston and New York and Boston, and beyond that were far-off places full of life and gaiety she’d never seen nor even heard of, and beyond everything like a green field with morning sun on it lay youth and Ireland as if they were something she had dreamed, or made up in a story. Ah, what was there to remember, or to look forward to now? Without thinking at all, she leaned over and put her head on Dennis’s knee. “Whyever,” she asked him, in an ordinary voice, “did ye marry a woman like me?”