Martin, a widower, doesn’t realize that he’s dying. He sits in his daughter’s living room, wrapped in quilts despite a woodstove throwing heat. His bones ache despite the coziness of the reading chair he occupies. A table nearby holds his late wife’s worn Bible, a folded newspaper, reading glasses, and an empty mug. These items should comfort and anchor him, yet they feel alien to him because he’s at odds with his surroundings.
Angela took him home with her following the stroke he doesn’t remember. Occasional impressions of his hospitalization, distant clicks and clanks, whiffs of disinfectants, and bitterness on his tongue, do punctuate his naps. Like now, he’ll twitch awake.
Outside, a muster of crows bursts by the French doors Martin’s chair faces. Shadows, he thinks. He considers a pair of walnut trees he sees, wintry bare in a grass-flattened pasture. Judging by the light, it’s mid-morning.
A tabby comes to the French doors. Its tail sweeps from side to side, and its toothless mouth opens. Martin rubs his rusky hands. He listens for his wife, Lois—who responds to the animals—until a sense of loss encases him. Dearly departed; his Lois wasn’t supposed to go first. Still, it figured, what with his history of loss and hers of heartache.
Let in the cat, he thinks.
His cane leans against the chair. He reaches for it and groans: pain is the only quick and clean thing about him these days. As he stands, his hips clack in their sockets, but his right arm braces. All good.
Sensing that one side of his is weaker than the other, he takes a tenuous step. The cat, a good mouser until his teeth fell out, is now gone. One room over, the kitchen door opens, the suction sound of quality, and Martin pictures Lois letting in the cat. He hears his daughter’s voice, instead. “Hey, Tom,” she says. Kibble drums a metal bowl.
It figures. Lois never kept an animal past its usefulness. She had a weak heart, but not a sentimental one.
Martin recalls the morning he woke to find her lifeless, her mouth gaping yet supple. He’d just missed her final breath. Using a handkerchief she’d ironed just the night before; he tied her jaw shut.
A cold wind blows. The field and the twin walnut trees belong to the old family farm. The forested hills on the horizon are white with frost. Clouds as dark as blackout curtains hang above them.
Those hills used to be closer. And dear. Yet not once did he and Lois take their Angela up there. Not once.
In the summer months of Martin’s youth, his family picnicked in the hills after church. His mother would spread several Afghans over a smooth outcropping of rocks to accommodate her large brood, a daughter and six sons. Martin can still imagine himself peering through his father’s WWI–issue binoculars, surveying their farm and the town lying behind it, the haze of summer as shimmering as the future.
Then, as if pleasure could trigger a misery switch, he’s a grown man, standing on the same outcrop, this time over an eighteen-year-old Lois in tears. He’s rubbing his thighs anxiously and pelting her with apologies, none of which calm her. Vaginal blood spots his mother’s Afghan. Mother has already passed, joining the twins, Paul, Father, and Johnny and Tommy—the boys everyone had called twins until the real twins arrived—and only Joy, Sven, and himself are left. Martin hadn’t known his animal urges could carry him so far as to make a young woman cry.
He swears to love and marry and honor Lois, yet she sobs into her thin hands. The youngest of her family, she’s expected to remain home. And a virgin.
“You wanted to,” he moans. “I could tell—”
“Daddy?” Angela calls from the kitchen. “Did you say something?”
The French doors are open. A cold wind slaps a promise of snow across Martin’s face, and a clock chimes the half-hour of some hour. Still wrapped in the heat of memories, he thinks his foot props open a spindle screen-door, and he’s flicked a curled sliver of paint from its weathered doorframe. He’ll make repairs to the house, he promises Lois. Says, “I’m here to ask you to be my wife.”
Labored coughing comes from the Sunday parlor. A series of strokes have all but laid by Lois’s widowed mother.
“You mighta paid a call once and a bit these past twelve years, Martin,” Lois says. “Or attended church regularly.”
“I’ll attend as a married man, I thank you,” he replies with a smile. She hasn’t turned him down. It’s only after getting his construction business running into the black several years in a row that he’s appeared at Lois’s door. He’s almost forty, now, but established. And she’s no spring chicken.
Without asking her mother’s consent, without her sisters needing to know, she marries him at the courthouse. The judge’s secretary serves as witness.
Mother-in-law complains plenty about the noise of ongoing repairs, but fails to notice Martin’s presence in the house, and she utters no word concerning Lois’s growing belly.
Eight months into the pregnancy, the old woman chokes on a piece of carrot. Lois cannot shift her mother to pound out the stuck carrot. The old woman’s death struggles resemble those of a cow brought down by a cranial bullet. They’ll haunt Lois. There’s rarely dignity in death.
She considered the abortion she’d undergone at eighteen and her mother’s death as the wages of her sins and the reasons her daughter’s body refused to grow, notions Martin never loosened from her. He himself with so many sins to account for. Like not knowing about the abortion.
Laughter ignites in the crystallizing air, returning Martin to the present. Must be his nephew’s towheaded boys, a pair he often mistakes for twins. Their laughter fades, and the main road’s traffic now becomes audible. Folks going somewhere. Martin’s goings are gone. He shivers.
“Daddy?” Angela’s tossing logs into the woodstove. “Come in before you freeze.”
He closes the doors, and purring Tom nudges his ankles. Stroke the cat—as if Martin could bend without toppling—and his hand might come away bleeding. The animal’s frazzled coat crackles with static electricity. Maybe, like him, the cat aches all over.
*
Cooking noises and scents drift into the living room. Onions, garlic, and beef. Angela hasn’t left off with the pasta dishes ever since traveling to Italy. She called from Florence. “The entire country’s a museum,” she shouted. “Maybe I should stay, Daddy.” From Sicily, she shouted, “What do you call a short Italian woman?”
He didn’t know.
“Mama!”
She wouldn’t have shared such a joke with Lois, who considered humor unattractive in women. Martin’s sister, Joy, had loved cracking jokes. Lois and Joy hadn’t gotten along.
Angela, born fat, happy, and alert, showed no appetite from the start. During her first six months, they were counting ounces she gained rather than pounds. Switching to solids didn’t help. At eighteen months, she looked more like a three-month-old. Didn’t walk until age three. Even so, people expressed amazement at the “early walker.” Once she reached age ten, they no longer marked the kitchen doorjamb.
Angela loved watching The Wizard of Oz because of the little people and found comfort in schoolwork, especially reading. In college, there’d been a boy who hadn’t been so big himself, but his parents snubbed their Angela—seemed they hadn’t wanted little-people grandkids.
Martin built this house for her. Told Lois, “So she’s here to take care of you when I’m gone.” He’d included a downstairs bedroom with an attached bath for Lois, who’d worried about ending her days in a parlor.
Angela’s a librarian at a local elementary school. “Nothing I can’t reach,” she’d joked after her first day there. The schoolchildren, bug-eyed enough at first, accepted her. “Where adults find fault, kids just ask questions,” she said. “I don’t have to earn a kid’s forgiveness for being different.”
She also teaches evening and weekend literacy courses at the community college. A newspaper article about her accomplishments came out after Lois died. Pity. Angela’s interest in adult literacy started when she was eleven, on the evening she marched into Martin’s office, announcing her mother’s shame.
“Of what?”
“You know what!”
At first, a quick of panic; him thinking she meant what he’d done to her mother on the ledge in the hills. The abortion that followed. What was he to say for himself?
Fierce and defiant, yet so tiny, Angela stood arms akimbo. “Don’t say you don’t know Mom can’t read.”
With relief, Martin slumped in his chair.
Truth was, he’d never thought about it, but he did know, somehow. Lois never made lists, left no notes, kept no diary or calendar, and she didn’t record her household accounts as his mother had done—not that Lois didn’t know how much money she had to the penny or the number of pounds of potatoes, beans, carrots, and apples she’d sold at her roadside stand from week to week, month to month, year to year. Everything done in her head. Remarkable.
She’d created rituals, too, like asking him to read out loud to little Angela any new library book. Lois would quilt nearby. Should Angela bring home the same book months later, Lois had no trouble “reading” it. It was Martin’s job to help Angela with her homework—because he had “better patience in these things.” Nearby, Lois would be ironing, dusting, sweeping, or thumbing through the Bible she knew by heart.
Oh, yes, he’d known. Had admired her cunning and resilience but never considered or reckoned on her misery. Had he so wronged her?
*
Martin dreams of a dog he had as a boy. When the dog barks, he starts, waking himself.
Tomcat naps on the sofa. Joists and beams pop and crackle. Judging from the position of the sun, it’s between one and two. The walnut trees are stiff and unmoving. Those black clouds hold their own.
He calls for Angela. No answer: she’s probably at work.
Martin has promised to take a walk. Last week, ice on the road kept him indoors, and tomorrow, snow will. The walker is kept outside, next to the woodpile. His usual loop is to the old farm and back. All good, paved road. But what with his aches and pains and being unable to walk fast enough to keep warm, he fears the cold. Still, the best defense against aches is moving.
He tosses wood into the stove. Angela wants him to keep well away from it, but he can’t let the fire die, can he? The room needs to be toasty for his return.
To enter Angela’s kitchen is to enter a playhouse. When building it, he set the range into the floor, sacrificing its bottom drawer so that it stood flushed with the low countertops. The fridge is half-sized, and he can run his hand along the tops of the hanging cabinets without his shoulder popping. The large kitchen window over the sink is low enough his daughter can see the old farm while washing up. Lois praised him for these tender touches.
On the counter: a glass of water and a note. He gulps some of the water and wipes his chin bristles. He ignores the note. Due to his little stroke, his eyes no longer coordinate. The optometrist gave him a sticker with vertical pleats for his left lens. It brought the words into focus but not their meaning. Some connection in his internal electrics fried, he reckons. Every day, he pretends to read the morning paper.
The red mohair cardigan Lois knit him and the Loden coat Angela brought him from Northern Italy hang on low hooks by the front door. The coat’s the most beautiful item of clothing he’s ever owned.
He props his cane against the wall and manages the supple cardigan, yet the effort leaves him breathless, God in heaven. How’ll he manage the weight of the coat? When she’s home, Angela climbs on her footstool to help him dress. Should he wait for her return?
Tom meows. Martin, one arm in his coat sleeve, shuffles to the door to open it. When the cat zips between his legs, Martin loses his balance and steps on the cat. Tom shrieks, and the cane clatters across the tiles. Reaching for it, Martin topples into the wall. Pain ricochets off his shoulder, and he can’t straighten himself. His bladder empties into his incontinence pull-ups. They’re already full, so his warm piss trickles down his leg.
Damn. What a humiliating predicament.
Peering along the wall, he notices a loose pin nail in the baseboard, which gets him thinking of a recent visitor, the man saying, “Got it, too.”
“What?”
“The prostate, of course.”
Damn fool. What man didn’t have a prostate?
“It’s cutting up the wife, awful,” the man said. Horsy face.
They shook hands, Martin embarrassed by their soft palms. Life should end with calluses intact.
Tires on gravel, and a slamming car door: Angela’s home. Early. She cannot find him stuck like this. He grunts and straightens. It’s that easy.
When she opens the door, Tom bolts outside.
The bags of groceries dwarf her, and she nearly trips over the fallen cane. “Wha—?” she says. She wears a facemask, and her gray frizzy hair sticks out in tufts from a black beret. She’s forty-four but works much older. It’s the shoulder hump, osteoporosis. And her fingers are arthritis kinked. “Daddy, what are you doing? What’s all over the floor?”
“Help me,” he says, one arm in his coat sleeve.
“I told you at lunch not to try going for a walk on your own again.”
Helping him out of coat and sweater, she babbles about someone’s son—a uniform and desert—and hands him his cane. “We’re in for a biggie,” she says.
The weather. Before a storm, the clouds blacken the hills. “We used to picnic up there,” he says.
“What’s that?”
Binoculars. His mother’s Afghan. Lois. Blood. Her tears. Martin probes a tender spot on his head. Must’ve banged it, somehow.
*
Martin sits at the kitchen table in dry pull-ups and fresh trousers. A kettle whistles. Angela’s chatting, mentioning countries he couldn’t locate on a map. “Afghanistan” makes him think of his mother crocheting squares of bright colors.
Angela sets a steaming mug in front of him. “The funeral’s next week.”
An image of a horse-faced man laid out on white satin, big soft hands crossed over his lap, causes Martin a moment of consternation. “Roger stopped by to visit only recently. We went to school together.”
“Not Roger, daddy. Raul. He was only eighteen.”
Paul? He hears his club-footed brother’s tread on the floorboards, a heartbreaking sound in too many ways. The family buried Paul next to the twins. Three fresh graves. Martin shakes his head.
“Yes,” Angela agrees. “Too young to die.”
The tea is scalding and bitter.
*
The cloud cover is complete. Vague light casts itself across the living room carpet. The cat is sprawled by the woodstove, and Martin watches its chest rise and fall. As a boy, he had a russet-spotted dog that slept before the hearth. One evening, he touched it and his fingers met a cold firmness. Recoiling, he’d howled.
Outside, small, widely spaced flakes fall. A pair of laughing toddlers upholstered in red ski overalls trot stiffly ahead of a woman pushing a stroller. Martin thinks of his twin brothers. Sadly, he no longer remembers their faces.
But in contrasting clarity, he sees their bodies dangling from Paul’s shoulders, their limbs swinging, their heads flopping. Paul lays them on the dining room table, crossing their lifeless hands over their chests, and Mother screams, “No! No! No! No!”
The story of what happened started with Father, fetched by the flu just after he and the big boys got the harvest in and the silage chopped. He took to his bed.
Martin and Sven later discovered that the silo chute hadn’t been shut properly. Nitrogen dioxide had escaped it, pooling in the closest niche, a favorite go-to place for a pair of seven-year-old boys playing hide-and-seek when they should have been mucking out the sheep pens. The gas also got into the chicken coop, too, wiping out Mother’s hens. It got into Paul’s lungs when he retrieved the twins’ bodies.
Their brutal deaths had been swift. Paul’s had not. A cough grew worse and worse until he drown in his own fluids.
The following spring, Father broke his neck falling from a pear tree. Nick and Robbie, sent to fight Hitler, never made Omaha Beach, victims of drowning and friendly fire. Joy once showed Martin photos of rows and rows of white crosses. She and her husband visited the boys in the seventies. “They’re one of thirty-three pairs of brothers buried side-by-side,” her husband said matter-of-factly, setting Martin’s teeth.
Mother died during Martin’s first term at ag school. Twenty-five years later, Sven climbed into a silo three days after harvest. He’d held himself responsible for Paul and the twins’ deaths. Thought that only he would’ve closed the chute improperly. That he was like that, forgetful. Had he sealed it true, the family’s chain of misery might never have happened.
Had Martin confessed to the oversight himself, maybe Sven wouldn’t have suffered depression for so long or killed himself. How is it a person can be paralyzed from doing what’s right for so long? He takes his wife’s Bible into his lap. He misses Lois dearly.
*
Upstairs, Angela laughs. She talks about “zooming” but doesn’t own a camera or video recorder—well, it’s smart phones and computers, these days, isn’t it? But how do they zoom without lenses?
The woodstove radiates too much heat for her comfort. In her upstairs retreat, she keeps a window cracked. The draft it creates irks him. He goes through the painful movements to push off the quilt, stand, and add logs to the fire. Flames leap around the fresh fuel. One year, Father returned from town with a leather pouch of powders. A pinch on the fire created green and purple sparks. The family hooted and clapped. Pleasure could be a penny’s worth of out-of-the-ordinary.
More laughter. Martin thinks of Joy, her love for a naughty joke. Thrombosis took her at the age Angela is now. That long flight home from France.
Tomcat stretches, yawns, and tucks his head under his belly flap. A miserable creature long past its worth. Martin’s long past his worth, too. Like Tom, he’d once been a good provider.
His summers between ag school, he worked in carpentry. Construction proved more profitable than farming, and he rode the post-war building flush. He righted the wrong he’d done young Lois. But did she ever want the Cadillac he could afford? The fur coat or trip to Venice? No, none of that.
He also righted the wrong he’d done Sven, practically adopting his son, Otto getting into trouble with drink following his dad’s death. The family’s ghosts make up the boy’s bones, so the farm and business are to be left to him. Angela’s okay with that. She’ll take the funds Martin’s leaving her and travel, he reckons. If her body will take it. Lord, he hopes she survives him.
The endocrinologist told them their daughter’s body wasn’t responding to the course of artificial growth hormones he’d tried—manufactured out of cow hormones! She thrived, though, and Martin took pride in her heartiness. Not Lois, sadly. She loved Angela, no doubt, but pity spawned part of her love.
Outside, snow falls. He can still make out the walnut trees. They’re the last to leaf in spring and the first in autumn to drop their leaves. He once collected their nuts in burlap sacks, shelling them during The Lone Ranger, his dog’s nose resting on his thigh. Mother listened, too. He pictures her knitting mittens and caps with red, store-bought wool, a gift. Uniforms.
A war’s on, he thinks.
*
Martin startles himself awake. A woman peers eye-level at him. Mother? Joy? Lois? Angela. She offers him a glass of water. Something’s cupped in her hand.
Did she just say it’s time to pay his bills?
He nods. But why pay them here? Maybe it’s his daughter who needs help? Help with her math? He tries to sit up. Groans. “I’m glad you’ve come to me for help.”
Angela smiles. “I’m sorry I woke you. It’s your pills, Daddy. Your medication.”
Several pills: white, yellow, and blue. She nods as he swallows them, water dribbling down his chin. Bristly. Why has he not shaven?
“Are you warm enough? Is the quit enough for you? I put logs on the fire.”
The woodstove crackles, and he closes his eyes. Mother’s quilting frame is set up next to the fire. Joy’s quilting, but Mother’s chair is empty. Where is she? Oh, Father’s bedridden and she’s taken him soup. Paul’s gone to give the twins a kick in the backside. The sheep pen should’ve been mucked out—and it’s the twins’ turn to set the table for dinner. Joy refuses to cover for them again.
“Late season snow,” she says.
What a prankster Joy is. Martin says, “It’s too early for snow. We finished chopping the silage only days ago.”
“The silage?”
A cat meows, and a porchlight flicks on.
“Hey Tom, you want in?” Cold air blows into the room, and Martin opens his eyes. Angela stands at the French doors. “Still coming down. Sunny tomorrow, though.”
Well, he’ll be. The world’s as white as linens on a laundry line.
Martin’s eyelids feel as heavy as wet linens. He fingers his wife’s Bible and hears her laugh—a rarity. Look! His family, all a red knitted caps, are gathered under the walnut trees. Lois pitches a snowball. A spotted dog bounds after it. The snow sparkles. The sky’s crystal blue. Warmth spreads through Martin as if he’s in the sunlight, as if he’s chasing the snowball. He laughs. He feels buoyant, soaring, and his breath billows pure white plumes.
*****
Meredith Wadley, an American-Swiss, lives and works in a medieval microtown on the Rhine River. Find her long-form fiction in various publications, including Collateral, Line of Advance, Longleaf Review, New World Writing, and upstreet. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Pieces from her series of idioms reimagined as flash fiction have appeared in several publications, including Bandit Fiction, Fiction Kitchen Berlin, Gone Lawn, JMWW, Lammergeier, Lunate, and Orca Lit. Read more at www.meredithwadley.com. She tweets at: @meredithwadley and occasionally haunts Instagram #meredithkaisi.
