How had she gotten in such a state? She had been on her own plenty of times, and she had never fallen to pieces before. So Tom had been gone a week? What was one week? She had borne up against departures that had struck deeper and lasted longer.
But it was how he had left, and where he was going. He had been summoned back to the city, back into the past, and Alice knew that was dangerous terrain. Hadn’t she wrapped that gun of his in an extra shirt and set it at the bottom of his valise? He’d thought he would be protecting her, leaving the gun behind, but what was Alice supposed to do with a wheel gun? She was a farmer’s daughter and a farmer herself, and she had learned to handle a shotgun, a rifle even, all before she was fourteen—the world was full, after all, of foxes, feral dogs, and livestock too old or too hurt to keep on living. On the night Tom left, as soon as she put the children to bed, she took her father’s shotgun down from the locked closet of his old room. She cleaned it and loaded it and laid it above the hutch where Henry could not see it. Just in case, she told herself.
But just in case of what? She knew that Tom had once worked for this man, and that the man was some sort of gangster who sold liquor and loaned money and probably did much worse. It all seemed like stories from another world, except now that world had collided with hers: an old man in a long black car, shining despite the dust of the roads, had summoned Tom back to the city, and in his place he had left an envelope full of money. Tom said to buy the boy some ice cream and before she could reply that she had left her coin purse on the chifforobe, he spread open the mouth of the envelope to reveal dollar bills stacked like a deck of cards. Where—she thought to say, but she knew where, and she had some idea of why. There was more she wanted to ask him, but he was already wearing the mask of a stranger, and then he turned and his body carried him toward the depot, the ticket booth, and the train that would take him to the city.
The days since Tom had left had been like any other days, which was to say full of work. An envelope stuffed with money couldn’t milk the cows and pasture them, couldn’t feed the chickens, couldn’t toss and stack the bales in the haymow, couldn’t figure out why the tractor kept stalling, or keep an eye on the baby, or walk the field at night looking for the cows that had broken through the fence. All of it fell on Alice. It was only now—as she wondered if there was a neighbor she could ask to lend a hand—that she realized how much she and Tom had built a wall around themselves; created a world where they were happy but alone. The people in town could scratch their heads and think that Alice had lost her mind and her morals and the good name her father had given her, but contrary to the their opinion, Alice didn’t retreat out of shame. She just didn’t want to share her happiness with anyone else.
When her father, in his mangled voice, had told her, Marry that one, he was speaking aloud a wish that Alice herself hadn’t dared to make. Her life and Tom’s meshed like the cogs of a machine, working together, coming in contact, moving apart, but always working, and always bound to circle back to each other. She had come to treasure those moments in the day when she would see him: first at breakfast, then in the milking parlor as she shoveled silage into the cows’ trough, then as she crossed the yard to collect eggs, then while she hung the laundry on the line, while she weeded the vegetable garden as he led the cows in from the pasture, and at last across the dinner table. Before the end of Tom’s first year on the farm, Alice knew she loved him—that she was in love with him—and she was sure he felt the same. But what did love and a shared appetite for labor matter when she already had a husband and a child? Alice confined herself to believing that if she was to find happiness, it would be as a mother and nothing more. She had married unwisely, and even though she loved this man she saw every day, the only way to atone for her misjudgment—her mistake—was to deny herself, raise her son, and work.
That was one way of looking at it.
But after a year of seeing a better life right in front of her, she was worn down. Wanting had made threadbare the false satisfaction of keeping up appearances. Hadn’t her own father, an honorable man who knew the pain of loss, told her that she deserved more?
If she had left it up to Tom, nothing would have happened. There would be no them, no Grace. They would have continued to circle each other, desperate and lonely and unworthy, growing older and having only their love of Henry to serve as a channel for the full weight of their feelings. Tom, schooled in self-denial, could have done it. But Alice could not bear it. One cold fall night she went to his room and—Shush, shush, shush—she quieted his shocked protests and climbed beneath the quilt on his bed and as she laid her head on his chest and her hands began to explore the knotty sinews of his body, she felt his resistance melt away.
If she had let the rising sun shame her the next morning, Tom would surely have fled, thinking he had despoiled her and the farm itself. Instead she greeted him, and the day, with a kiss on his wide, worried forehead and told him to get to work while she lit the stove. When he came in for his breakfast with her and the toddler Henry, he was perplexed but he knew that this was his family, if he was strong enough to accept it. Had he skulked into the house on unsteady feet or been unable to look her in the eye, she would have sent him on his way. He seemed to know it, and he washed the dust and the years from his hands and took his place at the table, giving a little nod, and they had been husband and wife ever since, as good as if it had all been settled in a church.