All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well by Tod Wodicka

Author:Tod Wodicka
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307377173
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

IX

There was my wife, my Kitty, and there was my wife's body. Between them, now, there was something else, a third thing. Curing the disease, I knew, would've been like curing a thunderstorm.

The old woman pointed to the wall. ‘Holes,’ she moaned. ‘There are holes in the wall.’

I held her hand, standing over the bed. There were no holes in the wall. ‘Shhh,’ I said. It would all be over soon. She was not here to see this, to be this, thank God. She was in Lemkovyna again; no longer in her sixties, no longer my dying wife, Kitty was four years old again and she was safe.

The holes were the size of human eyes. They had been drilled into the walls of the house some weeks ago, when it had been decided that the old man would die. The old man, a musician, had been ill for many months.

Kitty and her mother approached the house. They passed two cows, a dog, and some chickens. The larger creatures stopped chewing.

‘Such a stupid,’ Kitty's mother, Anna, pointed. ‘Look at the stupid. Holes. And for what?’

For breathing was for what. Kitty knew, even if her mother didn't. Her great-grandfather was very sick.

‘Be normal,’ Anna said. ‘Ach, Kitty, please. Not today.’

Kitty was holding her breath. Today was Sunday back home in Queens Falls, but here? ‘I am normal,’ Kitty deflated her cheeks. ‘See? Normal.’ Here it couldn't possibly be Sunday.

‘And don't with fingers in your mouth.’

Kitty removed her fingers from her mouth. ‘I'm not.’

Anna smiled at her four-year-old daughter, her perfect thing. She didn't know what she would find within that house, or what was expected of her now. How could she have possibly come from such a place? Why on earth had she come back?

It was the summer of AD 1934 and Henry, Kitty's father, had decided to close the Mansion Inn for renovations. They were installing toilets and bathing units in every guest room of the old Victorian mansion, no small project. Anna, for reasons she didn't yet understand, had chosen to forgo a summer of babysitting plumbers and her increasingly polite husband to visit the village where she had been born and, more specifically, the grandfather she loved. Kitty accompanied her mother across the sea as a trophy and a shield, proof of what Anna could do. Anna had made an American. What had those she'd left behind made? Butter? Hay? Kitty and the English language were a deflection, a border, because the young mother was terrified.

Cheers erupted around them and Anna jumped. In the sky, a booming. Chickens scattered. Dogs barked. And the entire village watched the beautiful German airplanes pass overhead.

The old woman giggled. She clapped, whistled. The airplanes were on the ceiling, and she watched them move from one corner to the other. Then back again. Until – there! – they appeared to hang motionless, three silver warplanes, dipping their wings, as if bowing to a standing ovation.

‘Kitty, please.’

She shouted, she pointed. ‘Hurrah!’

It is a concerted, humiliating effort.

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