Enough Rope Read online

  Ray Danahy straightened up. “Out cold,” he said. “Neat and sweet. Take a look outside and check the traffic. This is no time for nosy neighbors.”

  She opened the door, stepped outside. The night was properly dark and silent. She filled her lungs gratefully with fresh air.

  Ray said, “Pull his car into the driveway alongside the house. Wait a sec, I think he’s got the keys on him.” He bent over Farr, dug a set of car keys out of his pocket. “Go ahead,” he said.

  She brought the car to the side door. Ray appeared in the doorway with Bruce’s inert form over one shoulder. He dumped him onto the backseat and walked around the car to get behind the wheel.

  “Take our buggy,” he told Marcia. “Follow me, but not too close. I’m taking Route Thirty-two north of town. There’s a good drop about a mile and a half past the county line.”

  “Not too good a drop, I hope,” she said. “He could be burned beyond recognition.”

  “No such thing. Dental x-rays—they can’t miss. It’s a good thing he didn’t have the brains to think of that.”

  “He wasn’t very long on brains,” she said.

  “Isn’t,” he corrected. “He’s not dead yet.”

  She followed Ray, lagging about a block and a half behind him. At the site he had chosen, she stood by while he took the money from the trunk and checked Farr’s pockets to make sure he wasn’t carrying anything that might tip anybody off. Ray propped him behind the wheel, put the car in neutral, braced Farr’s foot on the gas pedal. Farr was just beginning to stir.

  “Good-bye, Brucie,” Marcia said. “You don’t know what a bore you were.”

  Ray reached inside and popped the car into gear, then jumped aside. The heavy car hurtled through an ineffective guard rail, hung momentarily in the air, then began the long fast fall. First, there was the noise of the impact. Then there was another loud noise, an explosion, and the vehicle burst into flames.

  They drove slowly away, the suitcase full of money between them on the seat of their car. “Scratch one fool,” Ray said pleasantly. “We’ve got two hours to catch our flight to New York, then on to Paris.”

  “Paris,” she sighed. “Not on a shoestring, the way we did it last time. This time we’ll do it in style.”

  She looked down at her hands, her steady hands. How surprisingly calm she was, she thought, and a slow smile spread over her face.

  Someday I’ll Plant More

  Walnut Trees

  There is a silence that is just stillness, just the absence of sound, and there is a deeper silence that is more than that. It is the antithesis, the aggressive opposite, of sound. It is to sound as antimatter is to matter, an auditory black hole that reaches out to swallow up and nullify the sounds of others.

  My mother can give off such a silence. She is a master at it. That morning at breakfast she was thus silent, silent as she cooked eggs and made coffee, silent while I spooned baby oatmeal into Livia’s little mouth, silent while Dan fed himself and while he smoked the day’s first cigarette along with his coffee. He had his own silence, sitting there behind his newspaper, but all it did was insulate him. It couldn’t reach out beyond that paper shield to snatch other sounds out of the air.

  He finished and put out his cigarette, folded his paper. He said it was supposed to be hot today, with rain forecast for late afternoon. He patted Livia’s head, and with his forefinger drew aside a strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead.

  I can see that now, his hand so gentle, and her beaming up at him, wide-eyed, gurgling.

  Then he turned to me, and with the same finger and the same softness he reached to touch the side of my face. I did not draw away. His finger touched me, ever so lightly, and then he reached to draw me into the circle of his arms. I smelled his shirt, freshly washed and sun-dried, and under it the clean male scent of him.

  We looked at each other, both of us silent, the whole room silent. And then Livia cooed and he smiled quickly and chucked me under the chin and left. I heard the screen door slam, and then the sounds of the car as he drove to town. When I could not hear it anymore I went over to the radio and switched it on. They were playing a Tammy Wynette song. “Stand by your man,” Tammy urged, and my mother’s silence swallowed up the words.

  While the radio played unheard I changed Livia and put her in for her nap. I came back to the kitchen and cleared the table. My mother waved a hand at the air in front of her face.

  “He smokes,” I said.

  “I didn’t say anything,” she said.

  We did the dishes together. There is a dishwasher but we never use it for the breakfast dishes. She prefers to run it only once a day, after the evening meal. It could hold all the day’s dishes, they would not amount to more than one load in the machine, but she does not like to let the breakfast and lunch dishes stand. It seems wasteful to me, of time and effort, and even of water, although our well furnishes more than we ever need. But it is her house, after all, and her dishwasher, and hers the decision as to when it is to be used.

  Silently she washed the dishes, silently I wiped them. As I reached to stack plates in a cupboard I caught her looking at me. Her eyes were on my cheek, and I could feel her gaze right where I had felt Dan’s finger. His touch had been light. Hers was firmer.

  I said, “It’s nothing.”

  “All right.”

  “Dammit, Mama!”

  “I didn’t say anything, Tildie.”

  I was named Matilda for my father’s mother. I never knew her, she died before I was born, before my parents met. I was never called Matilda. It was the name on my college diploma, on my driver’s license, on Livia’s birth certificate, but no one ever used it.

  “He can’t help it,” I said. “It’s not his fault.”

  Her silence devoured my words. On the radio Tammy Wynette sang a song about divorce, spelling out the word. Why were they playing all her records this morning? Was it her birthday? Or an anniversary of some failed romance?

  “It’s not,” I said. I moved to her right so that I could talk to her good ear. “It’s a pattern. His father was abusive to his mother. Dan grew up around that. His father drank and was free with his hands. Dan swore he would never be like that, but patterns like that are almost impossible to throw off. It’s what he knows, can you understand that? On a deep level, deeper than intellect, bone deep, that’s how he knows to behave as a man, as a husband.”

  “He marked your face. He hasn’t done that before, Tildie.”

  My hand flew to the spot. “You knew that—”

  “Sounds travel. Even with my door closed, even with my good ear on the pillow. I’ve heard things.”

  “You never said anything.”

  “I didn’t say anything today,” she reminded me.

  “He can’t help it,” I said. “You have to understand that. Didn’t you see him this morning?”

  “I saw him.”

  “It hurts him more than it hurts me. And it’s my fault as much as it’s his.”

  “For allowing it?”

  “For provoking him.”

  She looked at me. Her eyes are a pale blue, like mine, and at times there is accusation in them. My gaze must have the same quality. I have been told that it is penetrating. “Don’t look at me like that,” my husband has said, raising a hand as much to ward off my gaze as to threaten me. “Damn you, don’t you look at me like that!”

  Like what? I’d wondered. How was I looking at him? What was I doing wrong?

  “I do provoke him,” I told her. “I make him hit me.”

  “How?”

  “By saying the wrong thing.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Things that upset him.”

  “And then he has to hit you, Tildie? Because of what you say?”

  “It’s a pattern,” I said. “It’s the way he grew up. Men who drink have sons who drink. Men who beat their wives have sons who beat their wives. It’s passed on over the generations like a genetic illness. M
ama, Dan’s a good man. You see how he is with Livia, how he loves her, how she loves him.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he loves me, Mama. Don’t you think it tears him up when something like this happens? Don’t you think it eats at him?”

  “It must.”

  “It does!” I thought how he’d cried last night, how he’d held me and touched the mark on my cheek and cried. “And we’re going to try to do something about it,” I said. “To break the pattern. There’s a clinic in Fulton City where you can go for counseling. It’s not expensive, either.”

  “And you’re going?”

  “We’ve talked about it. We’re considering it.”

  She looked at me and I made myself meet her eyes. After a moment she looked away. “Well, you would know more about this sort of thing than I do,” she said. “You went to college, you studied, you learned things.”

  I studied art history. I can tell you about the Italian Renaissance, although I have already forgotten much of what I learned. I took one psychology course in my freshman year and we observed the behavior of white rats in mazes.

  “Mama,” I said, “I know you disapprove.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Tildie, that’s not so.”

  “It’s not?”

  She shook her head. “I just hurt for you,” she said. “That’s all.”

  We live on 220 acres, only a third of them level. The farm has been in our family since the land was cleared early in the last century. It has been years since we farmed it. The MacNaughtons run sheep in our north pastures, and Mr. Parkhill leases forty acres, planting alfalfa one year and field corn the next. Mama has some bank stock and some utilities, and the dividends plus what she’s paid for the land rent are enough to keep her. There’s no mortgage on the land and the taxes have stayed low. And she has a big kitchen garden. We eat out of it all summer long and put up enough in the fall to carry us through the winter.

  Dan studied comparative lit while I studied art history. He got a master’s and did half the course work for a doctorate and then knew he couldn’t do it anymore. He got a job driving a taxi and I worked waiting tables at Paddy Mac’s, where we used to come for beer and hamburgers when we were students. When I got pregnant with Livia he didn’t want me on my feet all day but we couldn’t make ends meet on his earnings as a cabdriver. Rents were high in that city, and everything cost a fortune.

  And we both loved country living, and knew the city was no place to bring up Livia. So we moved here, and Dan got work right away with a construction company in Caldwell. That’s the nearest town, just six miles from us on country roads, and Fulton City is only twenty-two miles.

  After that conversation with Mama I went outside and walked back beyond the garden and the pear and apple orchard. There’s a stream runs diagonally across our land, and just beyond it is the spot I always liked the best, where the walnut trees are. We have a whole grove of black walnuts, twenty-six trees in all. I know because Dan counted them. He was trying to estimate what they’d bring.

  Walnut is valuable. People will pay thousands of dollars for a mature tree. They make veneer from it, because it’s too costly to use as solid wood.

  “We ought to sell these off,” Dan said. “Your mama’s got an untapped resource here. Somebody could come in, cut ’em down, and steal ’em. Like poachers in Kenya, killing the elephants for their ivory.”

  “No one’s going to come onto our land.”

  “You never know. Anyway, it’s a waste. You can’t even see this spot from the house. And nobody does anything with the nuts.”

  When I was a girl my mama and I used to gather the walnuts after they fell in early autumn. Thousands fell from the trees. We would just gather a basketful and crack them with a hammer and pick the meat out. My hands always got black from the husks and stayed that way for weeks.

  We only did this a few times. It was after Daddy left, but while Grandma Yount was still alive. I don’t remember Grandma bothering with the walnuts, but she did lots of other things. When the cherries came in we would all pick them and she would bake pies and put up jars of the rest, and she’d boil the pits to clean them and sew scraps of cloth to make beanbags. There are still beanbags in the attic that Grandma Yount made. I’d brought one down for Livia and fancied I could still smell cherries through the cloth.

  “We could harvest the walnuts,” I told Dan. “If you want.”

  “What for? You can’t get anything for them. Too much trouble to open and hardly any meat in them. I’d sooner harvest the trees.”

  “Mama likes having them here.”

  “They’re worth a fortune. And they’re a renewable resource. You could cut them and plant more and someday they’d put your grandchildren through college.”

  “You don’t need to cut them to plant more. There’s other land we could use.”

  “No point planting more if you’re not going to cut these, is there? What do we need them for?”

  “What do our grandchildren need college for?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” I’d said, backing away.

  And hours later he’d taken it up again. “You meant I wasted my education,” he said. “That’s what you meant by that crack, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “Then what did you mean? What do I need a master’s for to hammer a nail? That’s what you meant.”

  “It’s not, but evidently that’s how you’d rather hear it.”

  He hit me for that. I guess I had it coming. I don’t know if I deserved it, I don’t know if a woman deserves to get hit, but I guess I provoked it. Something makes me say things I shouldn’t, things he’ll take amiss. I don’t know why.

  Except I do know why, and I’d walked out of the kitchen and across to the walnut grove to keep from talking about it to Mama. Because he had his pattern and I had mine.

  His was what he’d learned from his daddy, which was to abuse a woman, to slap her, to strike her with his fists. And mine was a pattern I’d learned from my mama, which was to make a man leave you, to taunt him with your mouth until one day he put his clothes in a suitcase and walked out the door.

  In the mornings it tore at me to hear the screen door slam. Because I thought, Tildie, one day you’ll hear that sound and it’ll be for the last time. One day you’ll do what your mother managed to do, and he’ll do like your father did and you’ll never see him again. And Livia will grow up as you did, in a house with her mother and her grandmother, and she’ll have cherry-pit beanbags to play with and she’ll pick the meat out of black walnuts, but what will she do for a daddy? And what will you do for a man?

  All the rest of that week he never raised his hand to me. One night Mama stayed with Livia while Dan and I went to a movie in Fulton City. Afterward we went to a place that reminded us both of Paddy Mac’s, and we drank beer and got silly. Driving home, we rolled down the car windows and sang songs at the top of our lungs. By the time we got home the beer had worn off but we were still happy and we hurried upstairs to our room.

  Mama didn’t say anything next morning but I caught her looking at me and knew she’d heard the old iron bedstead. I thought, You hear a lot, even with your good ear pressed against the pillow. Well, if she had to hear the fighting, let her hear the loving, too.

  She could have heard the bed that night, too, although it was a quieter and gentler lovemaking than the night before. There were no knowing glances the next day, but after the screen door closed behind Dan and after Livia was in for her nap, there was a nice easiness between us as we stood side by side doing the breakfast dishes.

  Afterward she said, “I’m so glad you’re back home, Tildie.”

  “So you don’t have to do the dishes all by yourself.”

  She smiled. “I knew you’d be back,” she said.

  “Did you? I wonder if I knew. I don’t think so. I thought I wanted to live in a city, or in a college town. I thought I wanted to be a professor’s wife and have earnes
t conversations about literature and politics and art. I guess I was just a country girl all along.”

  “You always loved it here,” she said. “Of course it will be yours when I’m gone, and I had it in mind that you’d come back to it then. But I hoped you wouldn’t wait that long.”

  She had never left. She and her mother lived here, and when she married my father he just moved in. It’s a big old house, with different wings added over the years. He moved in, and then he left, and she just stayed on.

  I remembered something. “I don’t know if I thought I’d live here again,” I said, “but I always thought I would die here.” She looked at me, and I said, “Not so much die here as be buried here. When we buried Grandma I thought, Well, this is where they’ll bury me someday. And I always thought that.”

  Grandma Yount’s grave is on our land, just to the east of the pear and apple orchard. There are graves there dating back to when our people first lived here. The two children Mama lost are laid to rest there, and Grandma Yount’s mother, and a great many children. It wasn’t that long ago that people would have four or five children to raise one. You can’t read what’s cut into most of the stones, it’s worn away with time, and it wears faster now that we have the acid rain, but the stones are there, the graves are there, and I always knew I’d be there, too.

  “Well, I’ll be there, too,” Mama said. “But not too soon, I hope.”

  “No, not soon at all,” I said. “Let’s live a long time. Let’s be old ladies together.”

  I thought it was a sweet conversation, a beautiful conversation. But when I told Dan about it we wound up fighting.

  “When she goes,” he said, “that’s when those walnuts go to market.”

  “That’s all you can think about,” I said. “Turning a beautiful grove into dollars.”

  “That timber’s money in the bank,” he said, “except it’s not in the bank because anybody could come in and haul it out of there behind our backs.”

  “Nobody’s going to do that.”

  “And other things could happen. It’s no good for a tree to let it grow beyond its prime. Insects can get it, or disease. There’s one tree already that was struck by lightning.”