The Wife Tree Read Online Free Page A

documentaries he’s watched, and me behind the eyes, for it seems that all the understanding I have of the world is only what I’ve seen…

October 17
    Dear girls,
    …Tell us, Mrs. Hazzard, the nurses in Emergency urged me the night of the stroke. Describe to us as accurately as you can what happened.
    Well, I told them, it all began with the tulips.
    The tulips? they repeated, puzzled, raising their eyebrows…

October 18
    The skin of the house anticipates winter. Today after lunch, I pressed my hand to the kitchen window, felt in my bones the cooling of the earth.
    “Why is the house so cold, Morgan?” William had asked me the day of the stroke.
    “It’s the change of seasons, William,” I told him. “It’s the first true autumn day.”
    “Well, you’d better get that furnace fired up, then.”
    Peering at the thermostat on the living-room wall, I turned the dial clockwise. Beneath my feet I felt a small tremor and heard thefurnace boom and complain, like a bear awakened from hibernation. Out of the old tin pipes rose the oddly sweet smell of burning dust. The heat now blasting up through the vents was a comfort to William.
    “It was so bloody cold out west, Morgan,” he told me. “I remember the winter I was fourteen and I got laid off in February by a man named Vandeusen. He sent me packing with empty pockets. Said he’d get my wages to me when he could, maybe in the spring.
    “I walked fifteen miles through a blizzard to our own farm, so frozen by the time I got there I wasn’t sure I was still alive. I went into the house and didn’t even have time to take my coat off before my father asked, ‘Where’s your pay?’
    “‘He said he’s broke,’ I told him.
    “‘The son of a bitch.’
    “‘He said he’d settle up with me in the spring.’
    “I stood there with the snow on my shoulders and my feet so dead with cold I was afraid they’d have to be cut off. I took a step toward the stove to warm myself, but he blocked my way.
    “‘You stand there till I’m finished with you,’ he shouted. I could smell the liquor on his breath clear across the room. ‘You look at me,’ he said. ‘That bastard’s a goddamned liar. You should’ve parked yourself on his doorstep.’ By this time he was unbuckling his belt.
    “‘I would’ve froze,’ I said.
    “‘You should’ve knocked down his goddamned door.’
    “‘What good would that have done?’ I asked. ‘He said he had nothin’ t’ give me.’
    “‘Don’t talk back to me,’ he said. ‘Don’t give me any of your lip.’
    “Then he swung his belt, hitting me everywhere. My shoulders. My arms. My stiff red hands. I was brittle as ice. Why I didn’t shatter into a thousand pieces I don’t know.
    “‘This’ll teach you to believe a goddamned Dutchman!’ he shouted.”
    Dear girls,
    …In the evenings I do feel around me the hollowness of the house and sometimes I wonder: How will I survive in this empty shell of our lives? But then I reflect that the quiet rooms are not so very different from the silence here over the past twenty years. And if I listen very hard, I hear not your father speaking, but the voices of my children…

October 19
    “Do you remember the apple trees in the yard?” I asked William today, though he hasn’t opened his eyes since the stroke. He remains very still beneath his white sheet, which is like a wintry landscape full of gentle hills and valleys as though already he’s entered another season.
    Did he remember, I asked, how we used to call them the Man and Wife Trees because they stood so close together, so united and loyal and enduring, their branches intertwined?
    At one time the Wife Tree lifted her arms gently, modestly into the sky, but now her branches are clipped and topped and pruned and painfully twisted and lately William’s been telling me that, because she can no longer bear fruit, she must be cut down. But I now wonder if, after all these years of hacking at her limbs, he simply