Nettles
Our farm was small-nine acres. It was small enough for me to have explored every part of it. Each of the trees on the place had an attitude and a presence-the elm looked serene and the oak threatening, the maples friendly, the hawthorn old and crabby. Even the pits on the river flats had their flats had their distinct character.
The girls as well as the boys were divided into two sides. Each girl had her own pile of balls and was working for paticular soldiers, and when a soldier fell wounded he would call out a girl’s name, so that she could drag him away and dress his wounds as quickly as possible. I made weapons for Mike, and mine ws the name he called. There was a keen alarm when the cry came, a wire zinging through your whole body, a fanatic feeling of devotion. When Mike was wounded he never opened his eyes. He lay limp and still while I pressed slimy large leaves to his forehead and throat and-pulling out his shirt-to his pale tender stomach, with its sweet and vulnerable belly button.
One morning, of course, the job was all finished, the well capped, the pump reinstated, the fresh water marvelled at. And the truck did not come. There were two fewer chairs at the table for the noon meal. Mike and I had barely looked at each other during those meals. He liked to put ketcup on his bread. His father talked to my father, and the talk was mostly about well, accidents, water tables. A serious man. All work, my father said. Yet- he-Mike’s father-ended nearly every speech with a laugh. The laugh had a lonely boom in it, as if he were still down the well.
Sunny and I had been friends in Vancouver years before. Our pregnancies had dovetailed, so that we had managed with one set of maternity clothes. In my kitchen or in hers, once a week or so, distracted by our children and sometimes reeling for lack of sleep, we stoked ourselves up on strong coffee and cigarettes and launched out on a rampage of talk about our marriages, our personal deficiencies, our interesting and discreditable motives, and our forgone ambitions. We read Jung at the same time and tried to keep track of our dreams. During that time of life that is supposed to be a reproductive daze, with the woman’s mind all swamped by maternal juices, we were still compelled to discuss Simone de Beauvoir and Arthur Koestler and “The Cocktail Party”.
He had slept in the guest bedroom the night before but tonight he’d moved downstairs to the fold-out sofa in the front room. Sunny had given him fresh sheets rather than unmarking and making up again the bed he had left for me.
Lying in those same sheets did not make for a peaceful night. I knew that he wouldn’t come to see, no matter how small the risk was. It would be a sleazy thing to do, in the house of his friends. And how could he be sure that it was what I wanted? Or that it was what he really wanted? Even I was not sure of it. Up till now, I had always been able to think of myself as a woman who was faithful to the person who she was sleeping with at any given time. My sleep was shallow, my dreams monotonously lustful, with irritating and unpleasant subplots. All night-or at least whenener I woke up-the crickets wre singing outside my windows. At first I thought it was birds. I had lived in cities long enough to have forgotten how crickets can make a perfect waterfall of noise.
The bushes right at the edge of the grass looked impenetrable, but close up there were little openings, the narrow paths that animals or people looking for golf balls had made. The ground sloped slightly downward, and we could see a bit of the river. The water was steel gray, and lookedto be rolling. Between it and us there was a meadow of weeds, all in bloom-goldenrod, jewelweed with its red-and-yellow bells, and what I thought were flowering nettles with
