The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

  She wondered if something was wrong with her. Maybe it was that as a girl she’d been a wanderer, lonely as a cloud and happy, in pastures and creek beds, a poetry lover, easily seized with romantic ideas. She had often consulted her heart to see if she had a religious calling; sometimes on her long walks she talked to God, and more than once she thought she’d heard Him speaking back. Through the rustle of wind in cottonwood leaves, a meadowlark’s sudden swoop, a cloud over the sun, but definitely God. Maybe in order to consider the things she liked most to think about, the great mysteries of faith and love and hope, and to feel like herself in her own skin, she simply needed great stretches of quiet.

  When she hinted at her tiredness to her closest sister, Sammie agreed that having babies and young children was difficult and, really, just ridiculous for what it put you through, but from her laugh and her jolly pink face Hattie could tell that she didn’t feel … what, what was it?

  She tried to take inspiration from Proverbs, the thirty-first chapter. She’d known the words from girlhood, if not by heart entirely at least by familiarity, but their meaning set her back all the more—all that virtue and spinning and weaving and vineyard buying, the rising up in the dark of morning and all the candles not going out by night made her weary, and what did the virtuous woman get for it, besides a swell eulogy? In the only act of sacrilege she’d knowingly committed she’d hurled the King James Bible her parents had given as a wedding present against the kitchen wall. It lay on the floor, pages fluttering, for almost a minute before, wracked with guilt, she seized the book and sent a sorry prayer heavenward. But finally, blessedly, she had gotten through the difficult years and was ready to begin her life again.

  When a third month passed without a cycle, Dr. Cobb confirmed her pregnancy with a rabbit test. It was after the manner of the time and place to wait to announce the news, even to a husband, and so she kept her own counsel until later that day. After supper she made a pitcher of lemonade, musing bitterly about the phrase—it seemed that no matter where she turned she couldn’t outrun platitudes—and took two glasses out to the south yard where Abel planned to put in a swimming pool.

  He lounged in a metal lawn chair, wearing khaki pants and a white V-neck T-shirt, smoking a Winston, glasses on the end of his nose, contemplating the shape and dimensions of the pool to come and sketching his plans on graph paper. He loved nothing so much as a mechanical problem. She pulled a chair beside him and they sat quietly amid their children’s activities.

  Fifteen and suffering the dual miseries of an awkward adolescence and a solitary nature, Doro sat in a crook of the sycamore, reading Look Homeward, Angel for what was surely the fourth time. Beneath the tree, Nick and Jesse tossed sycamore balls, trying to hit their sister’s dangling legs. Hattie knew she should stop them but they’d just find some other devilment, and anyway Doro needed to learn to get along with them, stinkpots though they were. The girl alternated between stormy and standoffish. She was, Hattie had determined, too sensitive, wound too tight. Like her father.

  ClairBell at eight and Gideon, seven, had dragged an old mattress to the cinder-block patio wall Abel had built and were jumping off the wall onto the mattress, bouncing and bobbing for attention, and then climbing up to jump again. ClairBell yelled, tirelessly it seemed to Hattie, and in a screech that set her last nerve quivering, “Look at me! Look at me!”

  Gideon was in his Mighty Mouse phase. He wore a ragged bath towel around his neck as a cape. “Here I come to save the daaay!” he called as he jumped—again, again—from the wall.

  “Six?” Abel asked when she’d gotten the words out. “I can barely support you and these five.” He took a sip of his lemonade and made a face. “How far along are you?”

  His reaction irked her but she was determined to put up a good front. “Maybe three months.”

  She smiled. It was funny, but if she’d been unsure that she wanted a new baby, after Abel’s negative reaction she was now having another think. Maybe the life growing within her was a kind of second chance. A chance to be less worried, less overwhelmed, a better mother. A chance to do things right, and—oh, heavenly days—maybe this was her old pal God, speaking to her in His inscrutable language! Without knowing she was even considering it, she heard herself saying, “I was thinking that if it’s a boy we could name him after your brother.”

  In truth, she’d thought Samuel would be fitting, given her own first name, Hannah, and its biblical implications.

  Abel’s mind raced. He felt conflicting, arguing voices coming at him from many quarters, all seeming to crowd into his own dry, constricted throat, and he was at odds with every one of them. He wanted to tell Hattie about the osteopath who had fixed unwanted pregnancies for several clients, but he wasn’t sure he should bring this up now. He wasn’t certain how Hattie felt about the subject. Abortion was against the law, so maybe there was his answer; Hattie was law-abiding to the core. Maybe he could sidle around to the subject later. He needed to think. “Come to the ham shack,” he told her with a nod to the yard full of children. “We can have some privacy.”

  Off the garage he’d made a room to house his amateur radio equipment. Among the transmitters, transceivers, receivers, condensers, the vacuum tubes, and Morse code keys was the first little glowbug he’d built as a boy, all his salvage, Collins and Hallicrafters and Hammarlund and Heathkit, his radio paradise. He’d put two stools near his workbench, plugged in an old refrigerator, and installed a cast-off couch. Outside he’d built and erected a forty-five-foot antenna. The antenna was a city code violation but if anyone on the council said anything he planned to argue the ordinance was a breach of his rights under the First Amendment.

  He locked the door behind them and went to a cabinet above his workbench for the bottle of Dewar’s a client had given him. Into one of the baby food jars he saved for storing parts he poured two fingers for himself. He extended the bottle’s neck to Hattie but she declined. “How about some crème de menthe?” He had a bottle of that as well, another client gift.

  “All right, but only a little,” she said. She drank only rarely, but this night she felt the need, though she wasn’t sure why, to join him. Lately Abel had been drinking more, she’d noticed. She blamed his clients and his law school buddies. As well there was a group of doctors and pharmacists and businessmen, World War Two veterans all, that he’d taken up with. A fast crowd, she thought, big talkers, big drinkers. This bunch went pheasant hunting on the Nebraska line, elk hunting in Montana, was contemplating buying a boat to moor in Gulf Coast Florida, where they’d invested in a shrimp cannery. She wasn’t sure of the details, but the cannery involved a bond issue and some other civic finessing. Pie-in-the-sky plans, she suspected, though Abel meant business on at least some of his enthusiasms. He’d already brought home three motorcycles, a BSA 650 for himself, and a Honda 50 and a Honda 90 for the boys to ride around the yard. It was illegal for Nick and Jesse to ride on the street, but Abel told them to keep to the dirt roads outside the town limits and they’d be fine. She wondered what he was teaching them about the law and how he could possibly construe that it didn’t apply to him. He had a saying that infuriated her—“If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying”—and she wished he’d quit using it in front of Nick and Jesse and even Gideon. They were already wild boys, cut from his cloth. They didn’t need a standard like this to march under. She had given up on the dream that one of her sons might have a call to the ministry, but she would at least like to see them abide by civil laws.

  Abel poured her a capful and handed it to her. He hadn’t known he would do what he did next, but he extended his jar to her capful and, remembering one of his father’s toasts, said, “May we get to heaven before the devil knows we’re dead.”

  At first Hattie’s eyes widened at the mention of the devil—she took hell and its high angel seriously—but then she laughed. She felt strangely spirited, a little like she had nothing left to lose, so why not throw caution to the winds? They clinked cap to
jar, and Hattie slugged the crème de menthe and felt the slow syrupy burn.

  Abel downed his Scotch and looked at his wife. She was a beautiful woman. In the domestic clamor of their daily life he sometimes lost sight of her loveliness. Her squared jaw and chin, her high, broad cheekbones, the warm color of her wavy hair like brown sugar candy—these had slain him from his first sight of her when they were children. Her dark eyes were canted, one more so than the other, and though her ancestry was English and Welsh, she looked as though she’d blown straight off the Russian steppes. Kyrgyz eyes, he thought. He’d picked up the phrase from some long-forgotten novel. If she had a flaw, it was the whitened scar at the end of her nose. A girlhood accident with a barbed-wire fence had ripped the fleshy tip of her nose and the line still showed white, especially when she was upset.

  She’d nursed five infants and her breasts had fallen slightly, but her figure was the kind people turned to watch, something about the way the small of her back curved, her posture. She had the most beautiful deep-clefted derriere he ever hoped to see. And she was modest, not aware of her beauty. Because her ways were demure, nothing carnal about them, this made her irresistible.

  They met at grammar school during the Great Depression when he was twelve and she was ten. Having set off a firecracker in a classmate’s lunch pail, Abel was racing one way around the schoolhouse and Hattie, engaged with her friends in a game of Run, Sheep, Run, came barreling around the other. They collided at the corner, knocking the wind out of both of them. When he saw the female creature with her nut-brown skin and wide cheekbones, her dark eyes at a fetching slant, he was poleaxed. For a long minute they regarded each other, and then they turned around and ran back the same way they’d come. At the time he’d had what he later, when retelling the story, called a “reaction,” his elaborate enunciation of the word and a look over his glasses giving listeners to know that if the first two letters were reversed, the e placed before the r, a more accurate idea of the phenomenon that overtook him, physically speaking, would emerge. Nothing more happened until a dozen years later and after the war had ended. When they met again in a college Spanish class he’d had another reaction.

  He had one now.

  “We need to think about this,” he said, “before it’s…” But it was already too late. He kissed her, and down onto the ham shack couch they went while outside their children jumped and raced and shouted as dusk shadowed the yard and the cicadas set up their squall and the fireflies came out. No more was said of choices.

  * * *

  That November, on the day Abel finished digging the hole in the south yard where the pool would go and Hattie had her eight-month checkup and learned that she should prepare for a Christmas delivery, the President of the United States was assassinated, just down Highway 81 in Dallas. In Amicus, all was ready for the new baby—the cradle in Hattie and Abel’s bedroom, a bassinette against the wall, a new oaken rocking chair, as the pitiful, creaking old one she’d had for the first five was good for little but kindling, but it seemed that in the sadness and upheaval of national events, everyone forgot about the child to come.

  On doctor’s orders, Hattie went to bed, letting Doro take charge. When she wasn’t shrinking from human company Doro could be bossy and officious enough to get the younger children off to school in the mornings. Her sisters Sammie and Alma brought casseroles and did the laundry and cleaning. The neighbors pitched in. Hattie had Abel move a television set into the room, and she lay watching the funeral cortege as horses drew the caisson slowly through the capital’s streets, followed by the caparisoned riderless horse. She had not voted for the man and she was not given to tears, but this terrible tragedy defied her usual reserve—somehow it was tangled up with her own doomed Nick, who probably wouldn’t grow to adulthood, and with the new baby to come and her fears for it—and she sometimes rose from her pillow to find it moist. Saddest of all the sights on the screen was the little boy in short pants and a blue coat on his third birthday, saluting his lost father. Into what kind of world was she bringing another child?

  Christmas came and went, but finally, on the last day of the year when Abel was about to leave for an office party, her water broke. They left the younger ones with Doro and drove to the hospital, where a few minutes before midnight their infant boy entered the world. They named him William Blackstone after Abel’s brother Bill and the British barrister who was Abel’s hero. And—Hattie did not tell him—William Wordsworth.

  In the early morning hours Abel left Hattie and the baby at the hospital and drove home to a houseful of sleeping children. He let himself in the back door, cocked his ear to listen for any wakers, but all was still. He went down the hall to the back bedroom to check on the boys and then poked his head in the door of the girls’ room. He went outside to the ham shack and poured himself a Scotch and stood in the dark. Idly he flicked on the power switches and the vacuum tubes began to crackle and hum to life, signals to be heard, their high-frequency squeal sounding ghostly and faraway, evidence of the world outside the narrowing boundaries of his own. He looked through the window at the frost-covered ground, and for a moment it appeared that a massive shadow loomed over the yard, an ominous-looking cloud, a black hole, a frozen star at the boundaries of which time stopped. He rubbed his eyes and looked again and understood that he was seeing only the empty pool.

  * * *

  Hattie had finished her pregnancy in the shock and sorrow of the assassination, but now the baby’s new life seemed to wash away her grief. She stayed on bed rest for a while, and the children flocked to the bedroom where she recuperated. They gathered around her, clamoring to hold the baby. They rocked him, sang to him, played with him, and it seemed that with the turning year her happiness knew no bounds, the infant days that had once stretched lonely and long now almost glowing. Around the little boy the family grew up a second time, reordering itself with Billy at the center. He was funny and sociable, a gigglebox, an endlessly diverting new toy. He loved it when they nuzzled him. He flirted with them to entice them into his baby games. Hattie felt she’d entered a second youth. She had loved the others, of course, but never like this. Here, maybe, was the child she could train up in the way he should go. Here, maybe, was her little man of God, her Samuel.

  Away from the center of things Abel entertained himself and slowly grew away from the messy goings-on in the house. He worked and tinkered. He built a cabana beside the pool and then a machine barn. He brought home more Hondas, another BSA, and a Ducati. He still turned to her in the night, and his appetite was strong as ever, but Hattie knew that with the new baby some balance between them had tipped.

  * * *

  From an early age, Billy knew how to get what he wanted. His ways were fetching and funny. He was interested in beautiful things—jewelry and statuary in particular caught his infant eye—and he loved best to play in Hattie’s jewelry case, in Doro’s makeup box, with ClairBell’s pop beads and plastic barrettes. He was lively, a miniature showman, a clown, dapper in dress from an early age. From his mother and her Singer he commissioned a business suit like the ones his father wore, complete with vest and tie, to be sewn from mint green polyester double-knit in a herringbone pattern. Hattie happily ran up the little garment on the machine, and everyone laughed and admired the suit when Billy put it on. He wore his tiny suit to church, to the grocery store, to the Dairy Queen for a cherry dip cone. He rode directly beside Hattie, standing up on the bench seat of the white Lincoln Continental Abel had taken in trade from a client who couldn’t pay his fee, his arm around Hattie’s neck. “He looks like a game show host,” Nick said once, laughing.

  “A tiny polyester butler,” ClairBell said, “or Richie Rich.”

  Hattie worried a little, but not much, and they all doted on him.

  If Billy did something cute and someone took notice, he repeated the action until the joke grew stale and it was clear he needed to be called down, which he rarely was. Hattie lamented, “You children are spoiling him!” But the
truth was that she too indulged him. Only Abel tried to bring order and calm to his youngest boy’s upbringing, to put the quash on the wholesale adoration.

  * * *

  When Billy was three he fell facedown in the deep end of the pool, drained for the season except for six inches of black leaf-and-twig-littered water. On that September evening Abel was at the town hall for a council meeting and not due home until dark. In the kitchen preparing pork chops, her mind on whisking lumps out of the gravy, Hattie had no clear view of the pool, for her back was turned to the glass wall that took up the south ell of the house. She failed to notice that Billy had ridden his tricycle onto the apron of the pool and had parked it at the brick coping that rimmed it.

  In the big central bathroom off the kitchen, home from college for the weekend, Doro made ready for a movie date to see Doctor Zhivago. Nick and Jesse rode their Hondas around the property, playing a charge-and-dash game called Spartacus. The object was to snatch a towel wrapped like a toga from a gladiator-boy who stood in a clearing, facing his mounted attacker. Though Jesse was the stronger rider, Nick usually won because Jesse would lose his nerve and at the last minute he would dodge the oncoming opponent. ClairBell and Gideon played on the banks of the creek that ran behind the house, trying to entrap a garter snake. ClairBell had just pinned the creature’s head in a forked stick and they were watching it writhe. It was Gideon’s idea to transport the snake to the big bathroom and let it loose on the slick tile floor to scare their big sister and maybe send her running in her underpants through the house. ClairBell and Gideon snickered for a while about that possibility, exciting themselves with the imagined vision of their prudish sister exposed, and then ClairBell picked up the snake and they made their way up the bank.