? ? ?
Emma woke, her first thought a baby, before she realized. Roland whimpered in his sleep. It was after midnight, the time the Duesenberg would have been coming up the road. Maneuvering so that her legs stayed at a distance, Emma put her arm around her husband. He was sweating, his heart beating too fast like it did when he drank. But he hadn’t had a drink. The doctor had set the whiskey bottles on a high shelf and told Emma to keep them there. For now, he added kindly, though Roland barely seemed to hear. He hadn’t asked for a drink. But he had taken one of the pills. Gingerly, Emma turned him onto his back, undid the buttons of his shirt, and started working his arms out of the sleeves. He cried out and she stopped, looking at him, his bushy beard, his muscled shoulders, his chest twice the bulk of Story’s, testing to see what she felt. Still he didn’t wake, so she went on, touching her face to his arms as she wriggled the sleeves toward his hands, reorienting herself, running a finger along his veins. Despite his sweat, he was clean from his hospital stay—she had to sniff at his armpits to find his scent. She expected him to wake then, but he slept, his face pinched as if fending off pain. “Emma-bee” was the name Roland had used when he was sorry for something, and wanted nothing from her but forgiveness. Emma-bee was a girl, exempt from his desires.
She rolled him back onto his side. His skin cooled. His breathing slowed. She drew up the sheet and wrapped her arm over him again and this time, Roland took her hand and drew it into his chest. Still, she kept her lower half away. After the war, plenty of men were without legs or arms, but somehow Emma hadn’t thought beyond them, to their wives.
Twenty-three
Josiah woke for the third day to the smell of Susannah’s blood-soaked cloths wafting up from the sheets and knew immediately that he could not stand to be there when she woke. The skin around her eyes was raw, her cheeks chalky with dried tears, that smell—like pennies in mud—unmistakable. Yet she had said nothing of a miscarriage, had gone on yesterday and the day before as if nothing at all out of the ordinary were happening. And maybe it felt that way to her, because it had happened so often before—maybe it seemed nothing needed saying. Or maybe she was afraid to say it, knowing by now how a thing like that didn’t have to be exactly real until you said it. Josiah understood this, though Susannah didn’t know he did, though the point was never, had never been, Josiah: he had experienced how speaking a thing made it irretrievable, shameful, how shared disappointment—the instant their eyes met—was a million times worse than bearing it on your own. He should feel sympathy for her, he knew. Always, always, he had been sympathetic! He had listened and kissed her and agreed to continue wanting what she wanted, he had agreed with everything she’d ever said. But now he was filled with rage: rage that she was keeping it from him, rage that she kept trying and trying, that she had never been taught as a child that you don’t always get what you want (he forgot, in his rage, that she had wanted a mother), rage that she couldn’t just make a goddamn baby. He pushed the Duesenberg faster than he had before—sixty miles per hour, sixty-five, seventy—jerked her roughly around the curves. He was dizzy with his anger, dizzy with the road, astonished as he wound toward Lanesville at how many other roads split off from the one he was on. He felt as he had when he’d first learned to drive, after he and Susannah were married: overwhelmed at every fork, stupid, hesitant. Only now he didn’t hesitate, he mowed through his fear, drove like a battering ram, angry at Caleb, too, for what Josiah knew must be the man’s judgments, that it was all Josiah’s fault, Josiah’s inferior bloodline, though the Stantons were so loyal to the Stantons they were practically inbred. Across the Cut Bridge Josiah gunned the engine, angry about the canal that ran underneath and the problem of dredging it and the speech Caleb had written for him, angry about all the words Caleb had taught him and that Josiah had repeated. He drove toward Lanesville, past the quarry, where he would soon be expected. His men were antsy, talking low about Sacco and Vanzetti. The Lowell commission had released its report: there would be no more appeals. At the sight of his slogan up on the wall— JOSIAH STORY FOR MAYOR