Benediction

8

IT WAS HER WAY, Willa’s manner and her character to keep the house clean and in good repair out in the country east of Holt though few people drove by to see it and almost no one ever visited and entered it. A white house, with blue shutters and a blue shingled roof. The outbuildings were all painted a deep barn red with white trim and they were in good condition too though they had not been used for thirty years, since her husband had died.

She still drove a car. Her eyes were failing but not so much nor so fast that she was ready to give up driving. She had the thick prescriptive glasses. She leased the land to the neighbor and he had black cattle in the pastures and did the haying and what he paid her was enough to live on if she were careful. She liked seeing the cattle standing at the stock tank at the corral beyond the barn. She liked the sound of the windmill working and cranking, the sight of the spouting water. She still kept a garden and she canned the vegetables and fruit and gave most of it away, and went into church on Sundays and attended various church meetings and served on the boards and did her grocery shopping on Wednesdays and ate in the Wagon Wheel restaurant on the highway east of town. Now her daughter had come home again.

On a hot day in June she and Alene went into town and ate and then shopped for groceries at the Highway 34 Grocery Store, then they drove past the Lewis house on the west side of town and drove slowly past the yellow house next door where Alice lived with Berta May and they both envied the other old woman. They didn’t see the girl out in the yard as they had hoped so that they might talk to her. They drove back home to the country once more and put the groceries away in the kitchen and then went upstairs and got out of their town clothes and put on thin cotton housedresses and lay down and napped in their separate rooms with the windows open letting in the hot summer air and woke in the afternoon and rinsed their faces at the bathroom sink and dabbed water on the thin napes of their necks and returned downstairs and later they ate their quiet supper and sat out in the yard in lawn chairs and watched the sky color up and darken on the flat wide low horizon.

What are you thinking, dear? Willa said.

About what?

I mean what are you going to do now? Have you decided?

No. I don’t know.

You know you can stay here with me. You’re very welcome. You don’t have to go anywhere. You don’t have to leave at all if you don’t want.

Alene looked out toward the fading sky. There was only a little light remaining. It would turn nighttime now and soon they would return to the house. It would be too cool to sit outside. It would get dark out. I’m so lonely, she said. I had my chance and I lost it.

What do you mean?

My chance at love and a life.

That wasn’t much of a chance, I don’t think.

It was.

You did well to get out of it. You were wise to end it.

No. It gave my life some direction. It was my chance, Mother, and I lost it. It was probably my only chance. Oh what’s wrong with me? Why have I ended up like this? I’m not even old yet.

Of course not, dear.

But why am I this way? How did you live after Father died?

I just went on. I was lonely too.

Aren’t you still lonely?

I don’t think about it anymore. I’ve learned not to think about it. You have to.

I haven’t yet.

You will, dear.

But I don’t want to. I don’t want to be one of those sad old lonely women and not even old but just one who has lost her life and her nerve. I don’t give off any intimation of sex or even the possibility of it anymore.

Sex.

Yes. I don’t put anything out anymore for anyone to sense.

What are you talking about?

I mean that quality, that condition of being alive and interested and vital and active and passionate in my life. Oh I hate this. I’m going to die and not even have lived yet. It’s so ridiculous. It’s absurd. It’s all so pointless.

You’ll get better, dear.

How will I get better?

It gets better. Everything gets better.

How?

You forget after a while. You start paying attention to your aches and pains. You think about a hip replacement. Your eyes fail you. You start thinking about death. You live more narrowly. You stop thinking about next month. You hope you don’t have to linger.