Roxanna Slade Part 17

"And I'm not?" he said.

If Palmer had smiled or laughed at that, I suspect I might have turned, got the child and walked to my father's for the rest of my life. Awful

and shameful as that would have been, I had that one choice available at least. I could have worked in my parents' kitchen and helped with the house till I outlived them both and lived on alone till my son, if he lasted, could store me upright in the County Home or bury my bones. I knew more than one girl who'd done the same thing. People-- especially other married women--tended to be extremely hard on anyone else who made that choice. And if the quitter offered an alibi such as "He beat me time and again" or "He's got a woman that's taken my place," the answer was always "What did you expect?"

But Palmer didn't flinch at my wondering if he was human, and his face a.s.sumed its best grave expression.

So all I could do was keep telling my truth. They didn't have country music back then, not that we'd ever heard. So I couldn't know how poor-white common my thoughts would sound. I'd never been cheated on before, not that I knew of. So what came out was "You feel like a lying filthy dog."

Palmer said "That may not be unfair." I said "Not if all I've heard is true."

He said "Maybe you better tell me what that is."

I still stood where I'd first turned to face him ten feet away. As I gathered my answer to his last question, I stayed in place.

But he slid to the farthest edge of the mattress, making the maximum room for me. Then he said "If you sit down here, I won't touch you, not if you don't ask."

I said "That's the last thing I'd ask for now." Then I knew I'd never asked for it before, not specifically. And I told Palmer so.

He couldn't deny it. But again he ran his huge palm out to smooth the sheets on my side of the bed. I'd changed them that morning before we left. They were clean as fresh snow.

And I went over and sat on the edge of the deep feather mattress, half turned away.

Palmer knew not to touch me. He was still awhile and then said "You're saying I've hurt you badly--"

I said "I told you I'm all but dead. Why not finish the lob? It would save on words and questions at least."

He said "I asked you what you knew."

I met his face at last. It didn't seem monstrous now or cruel, just strange as if he'd landed from s.p.a.ce with only the faintest resemblance to humans. I took that in, then told him carefully. "I know you've had a Negro woman that you've been using for some time now at your convenience. I know, for whatever reason you had in your pitiful mind, you picked a quarrel with Ferny today and went to that woman to shame us all. Ferny Dane never so much as scratched the back of your weaker hand. He's the gentlest soul in this world at least, and you tried to shame him when he nursed your father far closer than you. So of course Ferny told me--he's my blood kin. Then your mother confirmed it. They're concerned for me, Palmer. Some people respect me or did till today. Thank Jesus, somebody is looking out for me or I'd have stumbled along in the dark with a growing baby for months or years longer."

Palmer just nodded and watched me for more.

So I sat till I'd thought the whole mystery through again. This time my eyes worked, but my lungs nearly failed. I couldn't draw breath for nearly a minute like a child who falls from a high fast swing. Then I gradually thought my voice had returned, so I pushed on with what seemed the last question left--the only question now. "What am I supposed to do with my life here, mine and that boy's?" I pointed toward August in his crib beyond us as far gone as Mars and as close as my pulse. In that time and place, divorce was as unimaginable as a new ice age or lizards the size of boxcars in the yard.

At age twenty-three I'd yet to meet a woman or man that had been divorced, though--as I said--I knew one or two who gave up and came back to live with their parents or vanished forever. Only the men had a real choice to vanish, among the people I knew of anyhow. If men disappeared it was thought of as sad but far from abnormal. If a woman left with no forwarding address she made the Wh.o.r.e of Babylon seem like Mother Teresa on her finest day.

And that fact alone meant that I was sitting, on a bed I'd thought was my marriage bed, beside this man I'd vowed to serve for all my life; and what I was suddenly feeling was slavery. I was

chained to what felt like the world's grimmest master and the chain wouldn't break--not ever, not short of me killing myself.

Palmer said "Can I touch your hand?"

I said "Please don't." Yet there I sat in reach in a nightgown.

Palmer said "Then you want me to leave?" "When?"

"Now. This minute."

I said "You're paying the monthly rent, Palmer. I'm here at your pleasure. I'm the one to leave if leaving is called for."

"No," he said, "all you've got to do is ask; and I'll leave you, clean."

I said "For good?"

"I hope to G.o.d not. This is truly the one place where I've been happy except for years back in the empty woods, no company but dogs."

Palmer's face looked truthful but hadn't I learned as the main fact today that he could lie as coolly as the meanest cheat on Earth? I told him "I can't understand a word of that."

"It's the truth," he said.

"Palmer Slade, you're saying that spending your days and nights here with me--with August and me--and mixing your body with a whole other woman is your idea of happiness? Happy for who? Maybe you and your d.i.c.k--" I'm fairly sure I'd never spoken that word aloud anywhere in his hearing, though I'd heard him say it in private moments.

And it made him laugh, very quietly still so as not to wake August but otherwise nearly out of control.

It actually pulled me in behind him. Against my strongest better wishes I halfway smiled.

Palmer finally calmed enough to say "That's far and away the strangest thing I've learned in my life, and I doubt you can believe it. But listen now. This is a fact as true as sunset. I know I can love both you and our son like G.o.d the Father on a silver tray and still at the same time see what you call a Negro woman with no sense of shame or serious wrong."

I thought it through. "You're right about one thing. I can't believe that and, if I could, I'd still refuse to live in the midst of any such pure blind selfishness."

Palmer asked me the last thing I expected

even back then. "Are you a Christian?"

At first I said "Of course I am. We married in the normal Methodist church. I read the whole Bible and won a free hymnal when I was twelve." I realized that didn't sound too convincing. So I said "Are you?" He'd been to church with me on several occasions but seemed unimpressed.

He said "I doubt it, though I'm not a heathen either."

"Then why did you ask me?"

He knew at once. "Because if you're any kind of true Christian, then you're forced to forgive me. Or did I hear it wrong?"

I said "What did you hear?"

"The Sermon on the Mount, I think they called it." He looked serious again.

That of course was long before religious TV, but I'd read enough newspapers and been to enough revival meetings to know that a great many "Christians" were about as likely to forgive the simplest sinner as they were to eat a live snake. I said "Well, the way I understood it is, you forgive people, yes, but then they change their path."

Palmer said "In what direction? You the navigator of this whole s.h.i.+p?"

"What s.h.i.+p?"

His arms made a great wide hoop in the air and swung all around. "Our whole d.a.m.ned life --everybody we owe one penny's worth of money or duty, attention or patience."

I said "I can barely steer this little rowboat for me and young August."

"But you want to steer me?"

I couldn't believe Palmer wasn't grinning now. He seemed to have drifted so far away from me and any relation to the ground we had to live on. So I tried to think, as quickly and keenly as I could manage, all I really asked for. And what I said was "Forsaking all others, yes. Till death do us part."

"That strict?" Palmer said.

"For my part, yes sir. And anyone I live with from this night on."

Palmer said "What other option you got?" I said "My parents' house--it sheds rain anyhow. Some job I'll find. Honest single women that can read and act pleasant in public have jobs they can get." Then my voice lowered

further. "Look, Betsy Magee has paid her way with two-thirds of a brain. I can match that at least."

He seemed to agree. Then he crossed both arms on his bare chest as if to take his skin and bones off the market for this final round. He finally said "I can promise you this much. See if you can take it--I'll forsake everybody else as long as I can. If I can't keep that up, I'll kill myself some orderly way back deep in the woods where you won't have to see my filthy eyes and mouth one final time." He faced me again with his eyes cleared now of a good deal of anger, though still not safe from the wilderness he loved so much in the midst of our world. He was waiting for an answer.

I said "I've got one more real question." Palmer said "Bring it on."

I said "Who gave August that little gold finger ring he's worn for some time?"

Palmer waited so long I thought he'd refused me. At last he said "The answer would pain you."

"Say the name," I said.

"The last name is Pittman. Please leave it at that."

"But can you?" I said. "Can you leave it here and now and forsake all she's meant?"

Palmer said "I told you I'd try. That's a solemn promise. I'm not in the business of torturing people. I just got lonesome and acted on it with somebody I've known since early childhood."

I said "If you've been so desperately lonesome, it seems to me you've got company now-- company you asked for, a wife and a boy."

He said "Anna, I've promised my best. Please take it or tell me to truck on home." It was plain he'd given all he knew how to give.

I knew we'd got to the final junction. We both knew which way the two roads led. As silence spread between us, and August seemed to drift on out of our reach entirely, I understood that the next speech was mine. Palmer had made his choice. What was mine? I took the length of a long half minute; and it felt as if I was moving upright through tons of hard concrete, looking for sun. But I said "All right. I'll see if I can take it. But do you understand I

won't take but so much? You're not the only person in this mess who could die or vanish."

Palmer shut his eyes and slid further down on the bed, facing upward with his chest still covered. It looked so much like everybody's idea of a laid-out corpse that I thought he was trying to joke his way out at this last moment, but he never smiled again--scarcely smiled for weeks to come. And then he finally said "Understood."

I thought again of going to the baby and slipping that ring from his finger here tonight. But stunned as we'd all been by this full day, I slid myself beneath the cover like the thinnest knife, not leaving a trace. And to my amazement I was asleep in under ten minutes.

For weeks of long nights, Palmer and I lay down together on that same bed but never touched except by accident or in our sleep. Not that we treated each other with contempt or anything as unbearable as hatred. But for whatever natural or curious reasons, our bodies seemed to resist each other like two charged magnets. Even odder, though, is the fact that both of us slept like rocks in the ground. We'd douse the light and be gone in no time, at least I believed so.

If I happened to wake for a moment in the dark, I'd always hear Palmer breathing peacefully in his sleep. It was then in those brief wakeful spells that I'd pray hard to get just one more vision like the one I'd had of Larkin bare in the woods--stark naked and dead, smiling and aiming me toward his sad brother, Palmer Slade.

That consolation had poured so easily from Lark's clean death and had been so real that I've never doubted its genuineness. It came from another world, I'm utterly sure, with all the signs of a powerful care and mercy watching over me. So why wouldn't that same world help me now? In the fall and early winter months--faced with all I'd learned from Ferny, Miss Olivia and Palmer himself--I'd lie beside my mystifying husband and pray in the dark for useful guidance till I felt what seemed like actual drops of blood on my forehead. I'd even reach up and stroke my brow expecting to draw back fingers wet with my own blood. Dark as the room was, I can't be sure I didn't truly bleed.

I know anyhow that, even now seven decades

later, I can feel the absolute dryness that lived inside me and all around me like some unfortunate prisoner bound to a stake in the midst of a prairie and left to bear the pounding sun till death seems more desirable than water or a kindly hand. But neither Palmer nor I ever mentioned the matter again, not in so many words. And so we each felt miles apart from offering one another comfort or pardon for the damage we'd taken. I had to believe that my husband loved me. The signs were there.

But I also had to acknowledge to myself that my young husband was sick at heart for the loss of his woman, someone he'd known longer than me. I scarcely ever doubted he'd kept his promise to me and had sworn off seeing her. And surely he saw how burnt I was through all my parts. In the teeth of that much--and despite the real danger that August suffered from both young parents being sick at heart--G.o.d or Fate just kept their own counsel and left it to us to heal and walk on or fail and die with hard results on our nearest bystanders.

About a month after the awful day up by the river, I decided to act on a postponed duty. When Palmer was at work and August was napping, I wrote short letters to Ferny and Miss Olivia. I wasn't sure what if anything I actually owed them for telling me the saddest news of my life. But I thanked them all the same, said that Palmer and I were working to repair our lapses and I asked them again not to mention one word of the problem to another live soul. To the best of my knowledge as the years went on, they kept their silence.

At least n.o.body ever mentioned the sadness in my keen hearing, n.o.body from the white race anyhow. What's more Palmer and I proved to be excellent actors. So do a great many troubled married people. With all my experience to this very day when divorce is as common as fleas on dogs, I tend to be overwhelmed by the news that a couple has quit--they've fooled even me.

Palmer finally turned to me in the dark on Thanksgiving night, and I very slowly found that I could stand his nearness better than I'd expected. I partly knew I was not the first woman alive on Earth to face such a problem, but it would be untrue not to say that his presence came back with a

quiet kind of welcome all through my hands and mind. Still we abstained for another few weeks. Then around Christmas day I conceived a child and seemed to carry it normally right through till labor started.

This time I really did go to my parents' home with Palmer beside me. And there in late September '24, I bore a perfectly shaped little boy who never breathed. n.o.body with me including Dr. Rogers knew or would say whether the boy had died at some point in my womb for his own reasons or whether he'd been suffocated in labor by my body's failure to ease him out in time to live.

I only know that he moved inside me till the afternoon before the first pain and that his well-formed limbs and skin were flushed with good red blood when they let me see him for one short moment before they told me that he'd expired. Even so I wanted to give him a name. But Muddie said if I named him the pain would last even longer. So he's buried in the Slade family plot with a stone that just says Infant Slade and the date, one single day.

I insisted on the stone despite Muddie's urging, and Palmer gladly made the arrangements and wrote the check.

Through the months of that pregnancy, I'd taken some notice of the pressures on my husband. In those days intimate relations during pregnancy were thought to endanger the mother's womb and the child inside her. I'd tried to use my imagination and help Palmer bear that long exclusion once Dr. Rogers urged it on him. Palmer seemed to be grateful; and throughout the whole time he treated me with exceptional patience, spending every hour he could manage away from his work in the house with me or riding August around in the truck to use up some of the child's endless energy. And when we knew for sure that our second baby was dead, Palmer showed more visible grief than I. This many years later I think I recall that secretly I felt partly relieved not to have to face so soon again the big toll of motherhood.

All the same I was deeply blue for most of that winter. But as I said August was keeping me busy every instant of the day and for unpredictable parts of the night. My family including Leela were kinder than ever. And Palmer silently invented a steady stream of small gifts and pleasures to ease my mind. So I never took the fall or