The Law of Enclosures by Dale Peck

Author:Dale Peck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2015-03-15T23:17:44+00:00

9. Prairie Woman

Does she recognize the shrunken giant she nurses? His skin is jaundiced, mustard-colored, his hazel eyes are piss-colored and shot through with blood like spoiled eggs. The muscles in his arms and legs, once taut, hang now in slack ropy piles. His chest is empty, his stomach swollen only by gases, his hair uncut, uncombed, un­washed for months, and staining the pillow a greasy yellow. They met last fall in the town’s only pool hall; now it is winter and they are meeting in the town’s only hospital, which he plumbed last year. There’s not much you can do for hepatitis besides feed the sufferer, and she makes sure he eats every day. Still, he shrinks as he eats: months of fever burn off the gluttony of three failed marriages, and of course he can’t drink. On quiet nights they talk, the nurse in her white uniform, the patient in his white gown. He tells her of the months he languished on his couch, sure he was dying; perhaps he mentions the death of his first wife, maybe he even mentions his second and third marriages, but he fails to talk about his children just as he failed to take care of them while he was ill. She grows as he shrinks: she is pregnant, unmarried, but this doesn’t seem to bother him; it may even be the point that tipped the scales in his favor. By the time he leaves the hospital in late spring he is as handsome as he ever was and his smile, his jocularity, and his engagement prove that illness has made him humble enough for yet another woman to love him. They wait until she has the baby and her wisdom teeth are pulled; sometime between these two events his children show up at her house, surprising her with their arrival—and, they think, with their existence. He meets her parents for the first time shortly before the wedding; she will wait seventeen years to meet his mother; his father is long dead. In the tiny Methodist church in her hometown his son is one of the ushers. The groom tells the boy to disregard guests’ requests for “bride’s side” and “groom’s side,” else one half of the church will be empty. Behind an accordion door, cake and cham­pagne await: are cut, opened, eaten, drunk, discarded. Then the de­parture for their honeymoon is delayed for nearly an hour as the groom sifts through bags of mown grass in one of which his keys have been hidden, and then he wipes off the smear of shaving cream that covers the keyhole, opens the door to his crimson ’76 Monte Carlo, brand-new, and drives west with his bride toward the ski slopes of Colorado. Neither of them is as new as the car: they have been mar­ried in brown, and it is just a few seconds before they become invisible in the haze of dust spit by the car’s harried wheels. It lingers in a cloud behind them, like their souls, and then it disappears into the ground.

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