See Also Deception (2 page)

I'd rested my hand on the same place on the door trim so many times that it was starting to show the wear of my presence. Smooth with hours of worry and dread, the white paint had started to fade, discolored by the labor of waiting and the acidic oils of my skin. The terrified grip of my fingers holding tight to the molding had left an unsavory mark.

I was not on a ship, but most days I needed steadying, fearful that the sway of everyday life, as it was now, would knock me off my feet and toss me overboard. I'd be lost in an endless sea of madness and fear from which there was no return. And no one to save me . . . but me.

I knew that I would never repair the door, dab fresh paint over the mar, for as long as I lived, for as long as I remained in the house. It was like the notches that marked the growth of a child as it sprang as eagerly as a weed toward adulthood. Only this was no march toward independence or a keepsake log of happy milestones. There was no hint of a child in our house; Hank and I had failed long ago at that effort. Instead, it was a march toward death, the result of a simple accident, one that had left my husband nearly unrecognizable; a withering, fragile man, blind, paralyzed from the neck down, instead of the hale and hearty one that I had married and fallen in love with so many years before.

The wear on the trim would forever remind me of Hank's struggle to live and the sad fact that there was nothing I could do to save him or relieve him of his suffering. The truth was, he wanted to die more than he wanted to live. But leaving me and leaving this earth was out of his hands, or harder than he would have ever acknowledged out loud. I was convinced that it was only his permanent stasis, his inability to move, that had saved him from the choice of suicide.

More than once Hank had begged me to put a pillow over his face and walk away. “No one would know,” he'd whisper. He was mostly right. We were isolated, miles from town, our tiny house in the middle of seven hundred flat acres of durum wheat and silage. Our nearest neighbor's farm, Erik and Lida Knudsen's place, was three miles down the road; ten minutes as the crow flew but longer for my human legs. We were connected by a path carved out over the years by their sons, Peter and Jaeger, coming to help out when they could or were needed, and by the horrible tragedy that had befallen Erik and Lida three months ago.

But
I'd know. I'd know and couldn't live with myself, couldn't live with the memory of the darkest sin a human being could commit
.
I wasn't capable of murder. I just wasn't.
I could find no mercy in honoring Hank's request.

Hank would yell and curse at me—something he'd never done before the accident—when I'd disappear from the bedroom without saying a word. He would accuse me of being selfish, only to apologize later when it was time to eat or take a bath. Both of us were afraid. It was as simple as that. Lost and afraid, incapable of living the life we'd found ourselves in, but left with no other choice but to face every day the best we could.

CHAPTER 2

Shep, our ever-present border collie, appeared at my feet and watched my every move. He waited for me to flinch, to signal what was to come next. Sometimes, the dog's persistent attention drove me mad, but most of the time I found comfort in his intelligence and diligence. I'd said it more than once, but Shep would have made a great indexer if he'd been human.

We were both ready to get on with the work that needed to be done, but my feet were planted heavily on the wood plank floor, glued in place by hesitation and reticence, neither of which were familiar traits to me in the days before Hank's accident.

There
was
something in the way that Hank breathed that had changed since I'd last checked on him. It was a subtle sound, nothing visible, more like an echo in a far off canyon. A place that I didn't want to explore on my own, even though I knew I would have to.

“What's the matter?” Hank opened his pale, cloudy eyes at the same time as he spoke. He stared blankly up at the ceiling, his facial muscles still and unreadable.

I had to wonder how long he'd been awake, aware of my station at the door, his eyes closed, his ears open.

“Nothing. Nothing's the matter,” I answered.

It was futile to expound on the lie any further. Even blind and in his motionless, incapable state, Hank knew the peaks and valleys of my voice, knew the truth when he heard it. Even Shep wasn't convinced. My tap-tap-tap of the pen against the wall had set the dog on edge, alarmed him. I was certain the dog could smell my frustration. Shep took his eyes off me and searched the floor for anything that moved. Nothing did.

“You want to try again?” Hank said.

I closed my eyes, strained to hear the strength and certainty in Hank's voice, imagine him healthy, upright, getting ready to leave the house and tend to his daily chores. But that was more of a fantasy than I could easily conjure at the moment. That man, that Hank, had been taken from me long before I was ready for it. Some days I could barely remember when he could actually fend for himself. Caring for him was the exercise of child rearing that I'd never experienced before.

“Calla's not answering the phone,” I finally said.

“Maybe she's busy.”

“She's never too busy to answer the phone.”

“Personal business?”

“You don't understand.”

“You're worried. Something's out of place. How could I not understand that?”

I didn't answer him right away. He was right. Hank had always been good about reading my moods. He knew the difference between my personal clouds as much as he did those that floated in the sky. “It was a year ago this week,” I said.
All of the
doctors said you wouldn't last a month, but here you are
, I wanted to say, but couldn't bring myself to.

“I know what time of the year it is,” Hank said. “That wasn't it. The worry I heard.”

I had to strain to hear Hank's words. His voice was weak and scratchy.

“I thought I heard a rattle in your chest is all,” I said. “Doc Huddleston said we should always be wary of a cold, of something settling in your chest. The weather's changing.” I cocked my head to the door, put an ear to the wind that rustled around the house looking for a way in. I could feel its cold fingers grabbing at my toes. “The box-elder bugs are gathering at the seams of the siding, trying to find their way in.” I could already smell their frass mixed with the odor of human sickness and pity.

“Hibernation would be a nice option to have, wouldn't it?” Hank whispered. “Wake up in the spring when everything is normal, with no memory of the winter.” The longing in his voice was painful to hear.

I turned my head and watched as one of the little black and red beetles scuttled across the window sill. I hated the bugs, globs of them pushing their way inside looking for a source of heat to keep them alive through the winter, but Hank was more forgiving. He admired their struggle and desire to survive, and I'd never seen him kill one. If only he'd felt the same way about killing ruffed grouse.

Hank had told me more than once that hunting grouse wasn't like hunting partridge or quail. The birds didn't congregate in coveys and flush in an explosive flock of feathers and fear. Grouse were mostly loners, except for the young males. They tended to hang loosely together, pecking at the gravel along the side of the roads to fill their gizzards. Those were the easy shots, like shooting fish in a barrel or a lame coyote unable to flee a human's presence. Hank liked to hunt the more elusive males, the mature ones that flittered in and out of the thin woods, filling up on the abundance of fall berries. It took skill to shoot grouse on the fly. “Evens up the game,” Hank would say with a nod, as he polished the barrel of his grandfather's reliable shotgun in the same place, at the same time, in the same way year in and year out.

And it was that desire for fairness that had landed Hank flat on his back, unable to do anything but eat, sleep, shit, and hope to die.

To the best of everyone's figuring, Hank had stepped in a gopher hole as he went for a shot last season. He stumbled forward and somehow shot himself in the face. The worst of it came when he fell backward and broke his neck, paralyzing him instantly.

He couldn't remember a thing about the accident, and if there were any blessings in all of this it was that. He couldn't replay his actions in his head over and over again, belittling himself, trying to turn back time to employ the good sense he was born with. I was glad he didn't have the torture of that to face every day.

It had been a matter of luck that Hilo Jenkins, the former sheriff of Stark County, found Hank before he died. But Hank, of course, didn't see it that way at all. Luck had left us both that day and had yet to return.

“I'm not one for anniversaries or irony,” Hank went on. “I feel fine. There's no worry for you on this day; I'm sure of it.” The lilt in his voice was still detectible even in the whisper; a hint of ancient Norwegian and a lifetime spent on the North Dakota plains. His grandparents on his mother's side had come over on the boat as children from the old country, Norway, nearly a hundred years ago. My mother, Momma, had come over with her sister and parents when she was four. Our fathers' families, the Hoaglers and the Trumaines, had come from other parts of the world, Germany and England, at one time or another. Those family stories were lost in the dust of time. Most of what they had known about the old ways had been forgotten in their desire to be like everyone else—new and American. But I could still hear the snow and wind in Hank's voice, an old language trying to speak on a foreign, unforgiving land. He sang without singing, and I could listen to him talk all day, when he was in the mood, as we sat on the porch and watched the magpies, meadowlarks, and prairie dogs go about their business of living on their native land.

“All right,” I said. “If you say so.”

“I say so.”

“I have work to do.”

A slight nod shifted across Hank's face, and he blinked tiredly. “I'm glad of that. I'm sure Calla's fine. She's a hardy one. Been tested more than we know. She was helping someone, that's all. It's what she does.” He hesitated, then arched his throat forward for emphasis. “Today's no different than any other day; you know that, Marjie. You know that.”

CHAPTER 3

Outside the four walls of my little house, the country still grieved for the loss of a young president almost a year ago. Sadness and profound silence were palpable every time I went in to town, to the Red Owl grocery store, the Rexall drugstore, or Doc's office. Even the library was quieter, but I'd barely noticed, given my own circumstances of the last year. The strained gray mood of our nation seemed natural, expected, and certain beyond my own nose.

The Cold War was more visible in North Dakota than most anywhere else. Missile silos were being drilled into the flat-as-a-pancake ground less than an hour away from our farm, offering nuclear destruction to the world at the simple press of a button. Signs of human obliteration came in the form of rumbling B-52s flying overhead, giant airplanes capable of dropping bombs in case the missiles failed—a one-two-punch delivering extinction. We all feared the fireball in the sky, the mushroom cloud of our nightmares, becoming a reality. The closest thing we had to a bomb shelter was the root cellar. It would have to do, even though I had no desire to die in a nest of spiders and bugs who loved the darkness.

No one knew what the Russians would do in our moment of weakness, and I didn't care any more than normal. I just couldn't bring myself to be too concerned about the outside world going to hell in a handbasket. My world already had.

I'd been secretly grateful that Hank had resisted the temptation to bring a television into the house. His resistance to living in the future had saved me from seeing the images of an optimistic man and his wife in that pink pillbox hat arriving in Dallas before the tragedy, and a sad little boy saluting his father's coffin in the black and white aftermath. Maybe it would have been better if the morbid images
had
entered our house, if I had insisted that we keep up with our friends and neighbors and get one of those talking picture boxes, too. But I knew better. We had enough of everything to occupy our time, including grief, depression, and fear. There was no room for the chatter of the world's woes to be delivered by anything more than the radio that we already owned.

My connection to the outside world came into the house in the form of books. It always had, and there was no plan in my mind to change that anytime soon. It seemed like ages ago that Lloyd Gustaffson, our former extension agent, introduced me to the world of back-of-the-book indexing via a correspondence course offered by the United States Department of Agriculture. A series of droughts, hailstorms, and bad weather had dropped our yields to an all-time low, and with them went the surplus of our savings. Indexing, Lloyd had thought, knowing my love of books and reading, offered a way for me to make some extra income through the coming winter and beyond. And he'd been right. I took to indexing books like a grouse to sudden flight. It was books, and a good turn in the weather, that had saved us, put us back on an even plain.

I stared at the page of text from the
Common Plants
book lying on my desk one more time, trying to figure out what I was missing.

A prolific seed bearer, a single musk thistle (
Carduus nutans
) plant can produce up to twenty thousand seeds, though only about one-third prove to be viable. The tallest shoot, the terminal, flowers first, then shorter, lateral shoots develop in the leaf axils. An aggressive, healthy plant has the ability to produce over one hundred flowering heads over a seven-to-nine-week season. Seeds disseminate two weeks after the first bloom. The plant dies after it sets seed. Ninety percent of the lifecycle of musk thistle is spent as vegetative growth, thus making it difficult for the untrained eye to detect. Musk thistle is commonly confused with native or less productive invasive thistles such as bull thistle. Prevention of seed formation is the utmost action required in range management. Complete eradication is unlikely.