A Northern Light(63)

I can't read any more. I try to stuff the letter back into its envelope, but my hands are shaking so hard, it takes me three tries.

He knew she couldn't swim. He knew it.

I begin to weep then. I hold my hands over my face so that no noise gets out, and cry as though my heart is breaking. I think it is.

There are a few more letters, but I can't read them. I should never have read the first one, never mind nearly all of them. I stare into the darkness and I can see Grace's face as she handed me the letters. I hear her saying, "Burn them. Please. Promise me you will. No one can ever see them."

I burrow down into my pillow and close my eyes. I feel so old and so tired. I desperately want to sleep. But the darkness swirls behind my eyelids, and all I can think about is the black water of the lake closing around me, filling my eyes and ears and mouth, pulling me down as I struggle against it.

I am very fond of water, although I can't swim...





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The last time I saw her, Miss Wilcox said that "A Country Burial" by Emily Dickinson was perfection in eight lines.





Ample make this bed.

Make this bed with awe;

In it wait till judgment break

Excellent and fair.





Be its mattress straight,

Be its pillow round;

Let no sunrise yellow noise

Interrupt this ground.





These lines astounded me. They were as beautiful, as pure, as a prayer. I repeated the poem silently to myself as Royal told me about the new hybrid corn they had at Beckers Farm and Feed.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I had a half day off from the Glenmore. Royal was driving me to Minnie's house on his way into Inlet. He'd come to fetch me at the hotel and Fran and Ada giggled and Weaver rolled his eyes and Cook smiled, but I ignored them all.

Royal talked a mile a minute as we rode. I nodded and did my best to listen, but I was thinking how much better Ample make this bed is than Make this bed amply, which is what I would have written. And I was thinking that Emily Dickinson was a dreadful woman. She flitted and hid prettily amongst her words like a butterfly in a garden. She lulled you into thinking she was only talking about a burial, or a bed, or roses, or sewing. She got your trust. Then she sneaked up behind you and whacked you over the head with a plank. In "Charlotte Bronte's Grave." In "The Chariot." In "The Wife." And "Apocalypse."

"...and Tom L'Esperance says the new seed gives ears that are twice as big as the seed we've been using and that..."

Even after having had the book in my possession for several weeks, I would start a poem feeling that I was up to the task—girded—and then, before I even knew it, I was wiping tears off the pages lest the water pucker them. Sometimes I took her meaning in my head, and that was bad enough. Other times she was more veiled and I could only understand it with my heart, and that was even worse. She provoked so much feeling with her small, careful words. She did so much with so little. Like Emmie Hubbard, with the paints she made from berries and roots. And Minnie making filling dinners for Jim and the hired hands out of nothing. And Weaver's mamma getting Weaver all the way from Eagle Bay to the Columbia University with her wash pot and chickens.

"...which means you get more silage out of the same acreage. I can't hardly believe it! It's like planting twenty acres, but getting the sort of yield you'd expect from thirty..."

Emily Dickinson riled me, but I never managed to be cross with her for long, because I knew she'd been fragile. Miss Wilcox said she had a hard time of it. Her pa was overbearing and hadn't let her read any books that he didn't like. She became a recluse, and toward the end of her life, she never ventured farther than the grounds of her father's house. She had no husband, no children, no one to give her heart to. And that was sad. Anyone could see from her poems that she had a large and generous heart to give. I was glad that I had someone to give my heart to. Even if he didn't know a poem from a potato and tended to go on and on about seed corn.

"...the seed costs more, being that it's brand-new and a hybrid and all, but Tom says you'll make the money back a hundred times over. And you'll spend less on fertilizer, too..."

Why didn't Emily Dickinson leave her father's house? Why didn't she marry? I wondered. Miss Wilcox had given me another book of poems to take with me to the Glenmore—April Twilight, by a Miss Willa Cather. And a novel— The Country of the Pointed Firs, by a Miss Sarah Orne Jewett. Why hadn't Jane Austen married? Or Emily Bronte? Or Louisa May Alcott? Was it because no one wanted bookish girls, like my aunt Josie said? Mary Shelley married and Edith Wharton, too, but Miss Wilcox said both marriages were disasters. And then, of course, there was Miss Wilcox herself, with her thin-lipped bully of a husband.

"...it's really too late to plant, but Pa said to buy half a pound anyway, plant it and see what we get. Whoa! Whoa, there!" Royal said, stopping the horses at the bottom of the road that leads to Minnie's. "Matt, I'm going to let you out right here. Jim's drive is a bit narrow for this old wagon. I'll be back for you in a couple of hours. I thought we could ride up and see Dan and Belinda's land. Forty acres they've got. Just bought it from Clyde Wells with the money Belinda's father give 'em."

Gave them, Royal, gave them, I thought. "All right," I said, jumping down, careful not to hurt the posy I'd picked for Minnie.