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  Not that he could really blame them. There didn’t seem to be much for them to do out here. He had bought the farm in 1978 for, inevitably, tax reasons and had only been twice since then. James wasn’t sure how much farming had gone on in the last twenty years, unless he was a cactus grower. He had always vaguely assumed that it was a cattle farm, but he seemed to be surrounded by 10,000 acres of empty scrubland. Maybe they were in barns or something, or maybe it was a tax thing and they didn’t exist. He wondered who was meant to be in charge – there didn’t seem to be anyone who actually worked here. The house itself was huge and rambling, far too big for any practical purpose. He had only experienced an over-sized bedroom, a depressingly old-fashioned bathroom and a poorly-lit kitchen, though he had peered down gloomy corridors and had glimpses of sad empty rooms, with their shutters closed and furniture covered in sheets, like misshapen ghosts.

  His wife had rung from Paris to say that she was trying to join him, but, as alone as he was, he didn’t know if he could face that. Even worse, there was a message that Anthony was trying to get in touch – perhaps, now at the end, he wanted to do some kind of Californian father-son thing. Well, he’d be damned if he was going to let his death make Anthony feel any better about himself.

  He found himself wishing that he hadn’t divorced Sarah, and for the life of him couldn’t remember why he ever had. A divorce, followed by an embarrassing second marriage to a silly woman half his age. That made two failed marriages, and when he considered the rest of his family, the score card was scarcely any more impressive. His eldest son was a deranged terrorist, his daughters were imbeciles and Mark an atrocious wanker. He wasn’t even sure if he liked his grandchildren very much.

  Of course, and he had to keep reminding himself, there was still all the money. He was probably one of the fifty wealthiest people in Mexico. That was something. One should never overlook the importance of having a lot of money. It was just a shame that, at the end, there didn’t seem anything to spend it on. But, as he looked out over the empty landscape, he realised that having nothing to do with his money was actually the least of his problems. He was lonely, he was in pain, and worst of all, in just a few days time, he was going to die, and he suddenly, horribly, didn’t want to.

  Table of Contents

  Partly Living

  By Gervase O'Donohoe

  United Kingdom

  “Did you like our story, children?” she said, over her shoulder.

  “Does Mr Rabbit get home safely?” asked the little girl, anticipating tomorrow’s episode.

  “Ah, you’ll have to wait and see.”

  The blonde, curly-haired Tom, and his older, darker sister, Margaret, were still collecting their pencils, and she was wiping the board clean of the day’s lessons. The young teacher was glad that the two children were delaying their departure, giving her a short reprieve from her sentence, for this was the time of day when it settled on her like a physical weight. Little Tom was trying to re-tie his shoelace before starting his walk home, and Emily Matthews went down on one knee to help him with it. As she did so, she was conscious that, in truth, it was she who was holding onto them, for the generous midsummer evening stretching ahead would be longer for her than for them.

  Suddenly they skipped out of the schoolroom into the arms of their waiting mother. “Say thank you to Mrs Matthews,” she encouraged them as she headed down the hill toward home with the children circling around her.

  Emily turned the heavy key in the schoolhouse door and put it with the exercise books into the basket on her bicycle. She began to push it uphill, for it was much too steep at this point to ride. There was still plenty of heat in the afternoon sun and Emily took the hill towards the village slowly, for there was no hurry to be home. This was the most suffocating stretch of the day, when the heat intensified the suppression of life within her. The noise, the squabbling, the singing of her little pupils were over for another day, and yet the sun was still high. Back at the beginning of the year the night had almost blessedly fallen by the time she returned to her cottage, but now there would be hours of daylight in which to live, or partly live. Winter was more merciful when you were waiting.

  She stopped and half-turned to look across the vale to the line of the Malvern Hills indistinct in the haze of the heat. Soon that line would be prematurely sharp and black as the sun sank to the west leaving the eastern side in an early dusk. Emily envied the people who lived on those slopes, whose day would be shorter than hers.

  She was up the hill and abreast of the church now, and could think about mounting her bicycle, but that would hasten her arrival at home. She paused again, and from the churchyard the headstones of the village’s ancestors stared blankly at her, past waiting themselves, and knowing nothing of her fearful longing.

  She decided to delay the moment no longer. Climbing onto her bicycle she was home in a couple of minutes. She let herself in and revived the stove to make a pot of tea. She would spend some time with him. She brought her cup to the table at the window which looked out across the valley, and sat holding it in both hands, using the framed view as a stage on which to play out the scenes of her life with him.

  The same sun, she thought, would be lighting his day in his trench in France. It seemed unfair to Emily that the sun should be able to be in all places at once whilst she and her Frank were so far apart. His face came back to her readily enough, and the charm of his half-smile, and the tenor of his voice as he spoke to her intensely with one hand on her waist. She had first heard him reading the lesson in church, and it was his voice which had attracted her. She concentrated… and suddenly a rush of images crowded her stage: cycling around the lanes with him, her hair blowing in her face and he, up ahead, shouting back to her; going to Oxford with him to see his college two Easters ago; slipping into the Severn in the valley at Upton and Frank’s strength pulling her from the water. And then… then – she slowed her memories down, as people read slowly lest they finish a book they love – hearing about the war at the beginning of that August, and knowing that he was going to volunteer. One late August day, looking at the very same Malverns, Frank asked her to marry him and she said “of course”, and they shouted their joy into the valley as they stumbled together down the hillside.

  It was only a month after their hastily arranged wedding that he received his orders to report to a camp in Surrey. She hardly had time to adjust to their new closeness, but she felt every detail of it. She could see him asleep in the morning and recapture the smile that spread across his face when he woke and became aware of her next to him. She could smell his body, and feel the weight if it on hers. She briefly allowed herself the initial hesitancy and then the joy of their lovemaking, but the dreamy peace that followed it she could not experience because a lump of anxiety filled her stomach.

  The sun was dropping into Wales by now, and the dark line of the Malverns was clear. The people on the eastern slopes were in dusk. Lucky them. She glanced at her photograph of him in his infantry uniform – just as he was in her heart. She heard the rattle of a bicycle against her iron gate, and leaving her stage she crossed to the other window, but the visitor had already covered the short path and was knocking on the door which opened directly into the front room. She reached for the latch and the door opened on a lad in a uniform. Her heart stopped. He held out a buff envelope.

  “It’s for you, Missus,” he apologised, in a voice scarcely broken, and almost ran back to his bicycle.

  She took it and sat down, omitting to shut the door. She knew what it was. Her fingers fumbled the gummed seam on the back. She had ceased to breathe. A noiseless sob exploded inside and her body jerked involuntarily. The telegraph was open and partially torn. She let it fall and threw herself next to it on the floor, smoothing it out, tears beginning to drop directly onto the fragile page, as she struggled to read it without smudging the text.

  Even with her blurred vision, the words stood out in their precise military grid, each one separate as if af
raid to admit any feeling. She made out “…Deeply regret… Matthews… killed in action… 10th July… Lord Kitchener expresses his sympathy.” She stared at the news, and a cry rose up from her body which she feared to let out lest she should lose herself. Emily half rose from the floor and, treading on her own skirt, stumbled backwards into a low nursing chair. She curled herself up and rocked the cry out of her little by little. “Oh Frank, my Frank.” She took the telegraph to the table, and the movement released her tears again. She placed it carefully and began to dab it dry with her sleeve, protecting it as the last vestige of her beloved, a sacred memento. She dared not look at the photo of him who was no more. She caught the sun disappearing behind the hills and reproached it for lying to her for the days it had been shining on her and not on her dead Frank.

  Emily sat motionless as the dusk gathered around her. The scenes she had relived went dead. They became memories, bitter, bringing pain not joy, beating her not comforting, hurting her not soothing, their very freshness the cause of physical suffering. The time she had spent with him had been the last time. How could she have known that? The telegraph was a relic. She lifted it, cradling the tear-stained paper in both hands, offering it up. The black of the hills edged her page. She braced herself to read about him once more. The light was poor now, her vision blurred. She held her breath and looked again. She could not be sure – did it say “F.R. Matthews” or “E.R.”? Frantically she found a candle and lit it from the stove. She held it to the page. “E.R.” – not Frank. She checked again. She dared not believe it. She sank into the chair. “E.R.”, the vicar’s son, Edward. She did not know what to feel. The photograph, the images took flesh again; loss relented into longing. She dared not admit any elation into her heart. To feel anything seemed improper. She refolded the telegraph, found her coat and went to the back of the cottage for her bicycle.

  The church and its yard were in deep gloom as she arrived, and the Georgian vicarage appeared to be almost in darkness. Emily took the path between the graves. The headstones now seemed no more uncomprehending than she was of the bizarre scene they were witnessing. She was the messenger of death. Reaching the door quickly, she hesitated to knock, quite unsure of what she might say. As she faltered it opened and the vicar’s wife, Sarah, stood silently waiting for her. Emily could not utter a word. She threw out her arms to encircle the neck of the older woman, the torn telegraph held tight between her fingers. Sobs shook the stolid frame which her arms enclosed.

  Finding a voice, at length, she said “Mrs Matthews, I have a telegraph which… I’m sorry is for you and your husband.”

  “I know, my dear.” In her turn she held Emily very close. Emily wanted to be gone, but hated herself for her cowardice. The vicar’s wife held onto her still, and her husband appeared from the study, whose windows looked out across the churchyard to the gate. In his hand he carried an open telegraph which he held out towards her. Over the wife’s shoulder Emily saw him coming and, realising instinctively what it all meant, slipped unconscious through the arms of the older woman into a heap on the doorstep.

  Table of Contents

  As the Lean Tree Burst into Grief

  By Susan Johnson

  United States

  Okay, first I'll tell you about how I got back with my husband and then I'll ask the question.

  Well, it was last year, the year I turned 30. I was going through that stage women go through at that age – you know, getting in tune with life. First I quit my job. Then I redid my kitchen in an apples and roosters motif; I hand stencilled my floor in checkerboard and distressed it myself using Glid-strip and steel wool. I fenced in the area under the apartment that juts out over our garage with chicken wire, and I planted wisteria and trained it to grow up the posts so that it billowed out in big thick blooms. Then I bought a rooster and six Rhode Island red hens. Every morning I'd go out and toss chicken feed to them from my apron and breathe in the blossoms and say a line from a poem I'd forgotten: "One topmost mordent of wisteria." I ate fertile eggs, which I poached so that the tiny dot of blood cooked away. Invisible.

  My husband James was a high school drama teacher. Our garage was crammed with canvas flats painted in gaudy faux wallpaper, papier mache masks of Oedipus and Antigone, two ten foot step ladders that were only used once in a production of Our Town – stuff like that. No weed-eaters or jumper cables or things normal people have. James could make a high school auditorium look like Camelot, but he wouldn't fix anything around the house. The whole faculty thought he was gay but he wasn't. Underline that, would you. He wasn't.

  We had a few friends. Mainly we hung out with our neighbours, Irene and Everett Varney. Irene was a nurse midwife and Everett was a Presbyterian minister who loved beer. He came over and drank it at our house with impunity because we weren't Presbyterians. Anyway, Everett would stretch out in my dad's old wooden Adirondack chair and drink Red Stripe beer all the livelong day while James would build flats or paint scenery. They would argue theology. James would say he highly doubted that God was involved in the minutiae of our everyday lives, and Everett would say "he knew you were going to say that."

  Irene and I hung out in the kitchen making pepper jelly or canning vegetables. Irene said I was ready to get pregnant was why I was so domestic all of a sudden. When she said that I felt a sort of thump in my pubic area. Is that normal?

 

  Let's see, I was telling you about when I decided to try and get pregnant. Anyway I went off the pill and bought a bunch of books and I have to tell you that trying-to-make-a-baby sex was just incredible. Well, it was just the opposite for James. He hated having to perform according to the demands of my body. He started acting weird. He'd stay at school till 10 or 11. He got a string of strange ailments: first it was migraines; then it was kidney stones. Irene said I should cool it for a while, but it was hard. I was raging with creative hormones that I had no outlet for. Irene and I ploughed them into herb gardening.

  That's about when then chickens all got killed.

  We were keeping Everett and Irene's chocolate Lab Dixie while they visited their daughter (who's a med student and the University of Tennessee). Anyway, we tied Dixie to the water spigot on the side of our garage, and in the night I guess that rooster drove her crazy and she pulled the tap completely out of it and dug under the chicken wire and just chewed that rooster and all six chickens to bits. When we woke up the whole back yard was flooded and the chicken coop was a nasty mud hole of chicken feed and chicken shit and feathers. Dixie was wallowing in it. I just stood in the middle of the yard with my hands on my head and James said "look at your pyjamas." I was bleeding all over them.

  That same day, James's cousin (who his mother and dad raised) and his wife were killed in a car wreck. Right away we had to clean up all that mess and find someone to take care of that damn dog and take off for Louisville because James was the executor of the estate and guardian of their daughter Sara Beth. We drove back ten days later towing a U-Haul trailer filled with the bedroom furniture, stereo, computer, curling iron, etc. etc. of a seventeen-year-old girl who lay curled up, foetal, on our back seat.

  I was still bleeding.

  Well, James just obsessed over Sara Beth. He enrolled her in his high school and put her in his drama class and even cast her in the role of Abigail Williams in The Crucible. Every night they would rehearse lines at the dinner table and practically ignore me except to ask for more lasagne or something. I washed her jeans and blood-stained underwear and ironed her shirts and cleaned her room. One day I found a joint in an ashtray under her bed. Irene said God made teenagers insufferable so we wouldn't be so sad when they left. Let's see, that was the week before Christmas. I threw away all my fertility books and went back on the pill.

  In January James invites the entire cast of The Crucible to our house for a cast party. Irene and I worked all day making almond cookies with little hangman's nooses on them and a huge black cake shaped like a Pilgrim hat. I ladled out "blood" punch to thin, zitty
kids in Metallica t-shirts and their stage makeup still on. They sat around cross-legged in circles saying things like "did I play Elizabeth too bitchy?" and "I'm going to get a minor in art therapy."

  Sara Beth clung to James all night. Irene looked over at them and arched her eyebrows, but I said "she just lost her father." Irene said that she guessed everyone grieved in their own way.

  James was telling a circle of kids how he had met Keanu Reeves at a college drama competition, and I watched as Sara Beth slipped his wallet from his hip pocket and started studying his credit cards and photographs. He was casually aware that she was doing it, and that's when I knew they were sleeping together.

  Sara Beth told all her friends she was pregnant before we found out so of course we couldn't "do anything" about it. Not that we would have. Irene was militantly pro-life. Not in a Jerry Falwell kind of way, but in a miracle-of-life kind of way. Everett found Sara Beth a Presbyterian home for teen mothers where she could stay in high school and where they would find a family for her baby if she decided not to keep it.

  I let James move into the apartment over the garage until he found a new job, which was kind of difficult for a man with a theatre degree who'd been fired for knocking up a student, who also happened to be his cousin. I got my old job back as a copy editor on a daily newspaper. It was an hour's drive to and from, but I was glad for anything that ate up time. The office atmosphere – file cabinets, water fountains, Styrofoam coffee cups – was very comforting. I got home every night at around 2:00am and James had usually come in and cleaned the house and done my laundry and left me something to eat. It really ticked me off at first, but I was too emotionally exhausted to protest. As long as he stayed out of my sight.