AFTER YOU LOSE a husband you grieve for a few weeks or months, and then you tell yourself that it’s over, you will go ahead with your life with a new will and a new freedom. And you tell yourself loving is a habit you’ll get over and forget with your mourning. You have got beyond such things, in the dignity and wisdom of your widowhood.
If you thought that, you will turn out to be wrong. For when you’re least expecting it, seven months later, or seven years later, the memory of your loved one will come to you and catch you in the throat. And it will be like he is with you again. After Tom died, months after he was buried, I would be turning a corner or milking a cow, and something would remind me of his voice, of the way he dug with a hoe or nodded by the fire. I would feel his touch, and the tears would come to my eyes. I might be ironing or even walking up to the mailbox and think of the first time I seen him, or the way he went to sleep trying to read the paper by the fire, or the way he broke wind in his sleep, and my throat would lock and feelings stir deep in my stomach.
For I found that those we love never go away completely. They come back in the moments of our greatest sadness, and our greatest joy. And they always come unexpected. We are struggling to finish cutting hay, or watching a sunrise, and they are there with us. They are somewhere just behind us, and to the side of us. Sometimes they are watching through our eyes and listening through our ears. They are close to our ears, and close to the I that is behind the eyes.
The loved dead are with us and walk with us, and come to us in our awful moments, and in our sleep and in our dreams. They come to us in our prayers and pray with us. They are in our work and in our sweat. The dead loved ones haunt the breeze under poplars in broad daylight, and the night wind in the hemlocks, and the murmur of sparkling water.
When I was a girl I would have thought an old woman would have give up all thought of loving, but I was wrong. It’s true, loving night after night and week after week is a habit that can be give up, has to be give up when your lover is gone. But the need to be loved, the yearning to be loved, never goes away from you.
After Tom died I would wake up in the night and feel the emptiness and coldness of the bed, and the emptiness of the house. We had quarreled and slept separate often through the years of our marriage. Sometimes we slept apart for months. But always there had been a reunion. Always there had been the rapture of reconciliation. There was the promise that a quarrel would end and we would be one flesh again. Even apart I would know Tom was laying just above me on his pallet in the attic. And one night he would look at me long in the lamplight and be ready to join me in the bedroom like it was our first night and we was one flesh again.
But after he was gone I would wake up in the middle of the night and imagine I had been touched. I’d lay there feeling a hand had been run over my skin, over my breasts and my belly. That’s how much I needed to be handled and pressed. There was too much in me that needed to be brought out by loving. I was not that old yet. My hair had some gray, but I was not too old to need love.
You act your age, I said to myself. Act your age in front of your children and Pa and Florrie. Act your age in front of the preacher and the community, and in front of the Lord.
The need for love filled me like the need for fellowship with the Holy Spirit. I needed to be loved so bad I walked along the river and up the hill to the top of the pasture. The wind whispered crazy things in my ear and I rubbed my hands together and put my hands on my hips.
And I found out I talked to myself. I had talked to myself when I was young, but had got over it. A few months after Tom died I was scouring out milk pitchers with boiling water from the kettle and Florrie, who was helping me to dry them, said, “Ginny, what did you say?”
“Didn’t say nothing,” I said.
“You did,” Florrie said. Florrie always liked to be stubborn and critical. “You have been talking to yourself.”
“I reckon I know when I’m talking and when I ain’t,” I said.
“You said something about how a catfish wouldn’t eat what Lily fixes for Joe,” Florrie said and giggled.
I guess my face turned red, for that was exactly what I had been thinking, how uncertain a cook and housekeeper my sister-in-law Lily was. I was embarrassed to have said my thoughts out loud. I wondered what else I had said, thinking I was only thinking it.
“You talk a lot while you’re working,” Florrie said.
“Just muttering to myself,” I said. But I wondered what else I might have revealed, for I often thought about love things. In spite of myself I thought about men and women together. I thought about good-looking young men and the way they talked and the way they was built. I thought about Hank Richards that had moved from Gap Creek to the little house that my brother Locke had built out beyond the church before he went back in the army. Hank had shoulders as strong as Tom’s was and he was a good-looking man. Already he had been appointed a deacon. He was seven or eight years younger than me, and he had the strongest neck and arms. His black hair was wavy where it fell across his forehead. And his eyes was blue as the October sky.
Shame on you, I said to myself. Hank is another woman’s husband, and he is younger than you. And he wouldn’t give you a second look even if he was single. I had always thought Florrie was the lustful one in our family, and here I was having love thoughts about a married man, only a few months after Tom had died.
What is the cure for wandering thoughts for a middle-aged woman? I guess I learned from Tom that the cure for most things in this world is to work harder. If you are worried or distracted, just bring your mind back to the work at hand. For sweat and the feeling of accomplishment will go a long way toward curing most worries that settle into our minds and don’t want to go away.
But sometimes even the hardest labor won’t clear your mind of daydreams. Sweat only spirits up the blood more. And what makes you tired makes you daydream more. I thought of young men in overalls and no shirts working along beside me. I thought of what they would say as we worked. I thought of how we would walk to the spring for a drink in the hottest part of the day.
And not even praying helped. For when I prayed I thought of a young preacher saying the words of the Bible that had always thrilled me. I seen a young man with long curly hair and a thin blond beard like the pictures of Jesus saying my favorite words from the New Testament: “I am the true vine.” “I am the way, the truth and the life.” “I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.” “Before Abraham was, I am.”
Such praying just made me more excited. I thought of the young song leader at the revival I had attended at Crossroads. When he sung it was like he put every muscle of his body and every ounce of strength into his voice, in the notes and words of his singing.
On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand,
And cast a wistful eye …
O who will come and go with me?
I am bound for the promised land.
And when I prayed to the Lord to show me a sign to cure my loneliness and the hopelessness of widowhood, and when I tried to study on the higher things, what come to me was a picture of the millennium, of the New Jerusalem foretold in Revelation. And what I seen in my mind was a world of trees and meadows along creeks where boys and girls in thin gowns walked and danced in the shade of trees and grape arbors. In paradise they walked hand in hand and kissed on top of a hill where they could look out on a crystal sea. It didn’t help my problem to think such thoughts.
BUT THEN I learned to worry about my younguns more than myself. I seen I had been a selfish mama when Tom was alive, and I had cared too much about myself and my own feelings. And I thought more about Pa and how his heart had gone weak and sore on him. I thought about the sick and needy in the community. When the air got too thick and close in my head, I remembered how my younguns would be raised with no daddy, and how I had to love them enough for two parents. I thought how prideful my oldest girl, Jewel, was, and I thought how angry and resentful Moody was, and how mean to Muir, and I wondered what I had done to make him that way. And I thought how confused and excited Muir was in his mind, even at the age of nine or ten. And I thought how young Fay was and how I’d never done anything to make her less ashamed of me. She blamed me for the quarrels with Tom, and for the death of Tom. And I thought how they would have to grow up with no daddy. I didn’t know then that Jewel would die in the 1918 flu. I didn’t know what was coming.
It was when I worried about my children that my own little problems withered down to size. And I thought how I had always sought my own pleasures first. But the truest pleasure was to think of them first. It was simple advice, but it was the only advice that worked.
You have been tried in the fire of desire, I said to myself. You have wandered in the desert and in the flames of your bereavement. And you will turn all your loving and all your work toward those around you, them closest to you. You will rededicate yourself to your family.
But even so, it give me a thrill to watch the strong young men that worked with the rye thrashers in August. They labored in the heat and streamed with sweat. I watched them rub off the chaff that stuck to their shoulders. And I thought of the Cherokees that had camped on the same land by the river. I thought of braves that had played their ball game for hours in the fields until they got so hot and sweaty they had to jump into the deep, whispering pools for a swim.