A Piece of My Heart by Richard Ford

Author:Richard Ford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1976-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

6

He drove back after midnight, parked the truck, and took the boat across. A long grainy strand of mist hung above the water and the boat slid smoothly into the hidden space beneath it. At the island he beached the boat, turned it on its top, and stood out on the shingle looking back through the willows into the mist. He could hear one of Gaspareau’s hounds strike a rabbit in the woods and get joined by all the others, until they were all silenced by a sharp blat sound and then quiet eased out on the long bend of water and captured everything and held it suspended.

He tried to fathom what had ruined her. It seemed like she could rule her life to the point of perfect control, which was the point of purest despair, and after that she had lost it all and suffered as if something indispensable had been grabbed away so quick she didn’t know she had had it or ever could have controlled it. And that ruined her.

He didn’t like the idea that whatever had turned her life into a hurricane had turned his the same way and made a part of his own existence sag out of control down into the sink of unmanageables. Because if nothing else was clear, he thought now, that much was. Either by diligence or intuition or just good luck he had brought his life to order. And it satisfied him that doing it hadn’t called on anything more than his own good instincts.

She had had him drive the road to Marvell, toward Little Rock, and pointed to the side of the road at a little gravel spin-out that dipped into the trees, and had him stop. At the bottom of a path leading off in the dark he could see a pine lean-to opened to the highway. She said she wanted a quarter, and got out and went down and stood up under the shelter, and he heard the coin drop inside a tin can and she materialized out of the trees.

“What was it?” he said when she got back inside.

“The Gospel Nook,” she said as if she thought he ought to know what it was.

“What the hell is that?”

“Where you go pray for whatever you want,” she said. “Whenever you want. That’s why they put it out in the open.”

“What’d you pray for?” he said, amused by the whole business. He took another look and saw the shape looked like an outside toilet.

“My soul,” she said.

“What’s wrong with it?” He pulled the truck around back onto the road and aimed it toward town.

“Nothin,” she said. “But if I got one, I want it took care of right.”

“Why didn’t you pray for Robard?” he said, feeling good and skinning his hand up the soft inside of her legs.

“I prayed for him,” she said. “I give a quarter to St. Jude.”

“Who’s he?” he said.

“The one for the lost causes,” she said. “They got a list of saints stuck to the wall.

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