The Jew's Wife & Other Stories Read Online Free Page A

met her a couple hours ago he took her for a woman
of fifty or fifty-five (the mechanic was of indeterminate age,
anything from forty upward). Now he lowered his estimate of her age
by several years. It was not that she looked younger than she had
earlier but that her face, he realized, had been pinched then as if
from having endured too many prairie winters. It looked softer now,
more exposed, vulnerable.
        She asked if he
had slept well.
       “ Like a top. I
was more tired than I thought. I want to thank you again for your
hospitality Mrs....”
       “ You can
call me Martha,” she said, settling into a second rocker on the
other side of the screen door.
        During
lunch there hadn’t been much conversation, an unusual situation for
the curate. Whenever he was invited to a parishioner’s home, he
always became the center of attention. The best china and
dinnerware were brought out, and the talk, directed toward himself
as if he were a celebrity on a television talk show, never let up.
At first he felt awkward with the mechanic and his wife because no
one was competing to hold his attention. But as the meal had
progressed he came to understand he was not being accorded any
special notice precisely because, as far as his hosts knew, there
was nothing unusual about him. After realizing this he relaxed and
even began to enjoy their cryptic but somehow intimate remarks
about the upcoming harvest and other local matters.
        Even so,
long periods of silence, even of the significant, if not quite
pregnant, variety these people engaged in, made him uneasy. He
decided to start a conversation, actually a series of questions,
about the corn, the garage and other topics he thought might
interest the woman. She replied laconically, rocking gently as if
merely to keep the air in motion across her body.
       “ I
notice you have a son,” he said finally. “I hope he won’t mind a
stranger usurping his bed for an hour.”
        This
time the woman did not reply at all. She went on rocking as before,
her face expressionless. But her very lack of response and the way
she continued to rock and stare at the hot cornfields,
signified.
       “ We had a son, Mr.
Walther.”
        He waited, but
all that followed was a hardening of the lines around her mouth and
eyes. Her face no longer looked vulnerable. She had become again
the steely-eyed Mormon. She drew a quick breath through her narrow
nostrils.
       “ Our boy
died—was killed—two years ago.”
        It was not the
sort of statement, given the frequency with which he had to deal
with death and its announcement, that should have brought him up
short. But something about the woman’s manner made him feel guilty
for so ineptly blundering into this family tragedy. Had she spoken
to him as a priest he could have responded appropriately. As it
was, he was at a loss what to say.
       “ I’m very
sorry.”
        She elevated her
chin a fraction of an inch, but that was her only acknowledgement
of his sympathy. It was as if he had proffered an unacceptable
apology on behalf of some distant potentate. Her rocker pressed
relentlessly against the dry-rotted boards. Her expression was
fixed, determined, but devoid of self-pity. It was not the look of
a woman who wanted or would accept sympathy. He had not come across
many Marthas.
       “ He died
accidentally,” she declared with the suddenness of a thunderclap.
“A football scrimmage.... No one was to blame.”
        He could
see the high school football field as clearly as if she had given a
detailed description: the prone youth, the stunned teammates, the
whining ambulance. Two years ago there must have been tears, bitter
tears. He glanced again at her puffy eyes. But everything else
about her denied the use, and even the existence, of tears. No one
was to blame—except chance, fate or whatever it was she saw across
those cornfields measuring our lives with fickle rule.
       “