Black Chalk

There is a loud noise beside me that makes me spin around. It is the chair on which Chad’s mom was sitting. She has risen so quickly she has knocked it over backward. She stands there clenching the edge of the table. Frank, I’ve had just about enough, she shouts, her voice straining, yearning to be fully unleashed. Don’t you think it’s bad enough I don’t see him? She looks down at her hands and her voice tempers a little. Now you can just go, she says. God, please go. Go and do anything, go and just . . . feed the animals.

Animals don’t need feeding yet, the farmer says, swallowing back his gust of temper.

The rage is released from Chad’s mom now, it unspools as if a huge weight has been dropped. I will not listen to this for one more minute, she screams. Thirteen years and not a minute longer, she cries. Now leave the mess you just made and go feed the animals.

The farmer wipes his hands on the hips of his pants. His wife is breathing heavily and her head hangs low, not looking at him. He takes his cap from the coat hook, drops it onto his head without pulling it snug, and leaves.

I’m so sorry, Chad’s mom says. That can’t have been at all nice for you to witness, she says. She picks up the chair. Let me make some more food, she says.

LXXIV(iii) In silence she cleans and she cooks and I eat.

From the kitchen window I can see a large cinder-block shed with a corrugated roof. A metal silo towers above the low building. The farmer crosses the yard to the building, sits outside and lights a cigarette. When he is finished he waits a minute before lighting another.

Chad’s mom takes my plate and I thank her.

She washes up in the kitchen sink. I imagine she can see her husband from the window there. She stares out into the distance and says, I’d never leave my husband, no matter what he did. But I think he’d leave me. She scrubs the forks carefully, pushing the bristles of a brush between each tine. Oh, he wouldn’t leave me for another woman, she says, even if he knew how to meet one.

She moves over to sit at the table again, drying her hands on a dish towel while she speaks. I’d like to see my son, she says. Without my husband around, I mean. And you can tell my son I said that. Anywhere he wants. I’ll come down to the city, I don’t expect him to make any effort himself. She finishes rubbing her hands with the dish towel and looks up at me. Frank feeds the animals every day at noon, she says. She looks up at the clock, five to twelve. If you could phone me one day at exactly five past, she says, then I would know that it’s you with an answer. Could you do that? she says.

I don’t know, I say. And Chad’s mom looks so heartbroken that I add quickly, I just mean that I don’t know what’s going on here.

Oh, she says, Chad didn’t tell you?

I shake my head. No, I say, and I don’t want to talk to him and find myself in the middle of something I don’t understand, or something I have no right to be in.

You’re right, she says, sniffing and gathering the dish towel in her lap. But I don’t know how far back I should start, she says. You really don’t know anything? she asks.

I sigh. Chad used to speak about his school life, I say. And I knew he grew up on a farm. And I know he had to leave Pitt early but he didn’t say why. And that’s everything.

Oh, she says. OK then. Will you give me just a minute?

I say yes and she smears her cheekbones with the back of her hand.

Chad’s mom gets up, goes to the stove and turns it on. She goes to the fridge and takes out a sausage-shaped cylinder. She opens a kitchen-cabinet door and takes out a bag of chocolate chips. Turning to me and holding the cookie dough and chocolate chips, she says, I just add extra chips to the store-bought dough, that’s my secret, she says. But don’t tell anyone.

LXXIV(iv) He’s Chad’s father all right, she says, there’s no doubt or dispute about that. But maybe that shouldn’t need saying. Oh, that’s not a very good start.

Frank and me got married old, she says, for people our generation at least. Both past thirty. Even older by the time I fell pregnant with Chad. So he was our only one. She looks up toward the ceiling. Perhaps I should just say it more simple, she says.

She takes a deep breath. Frank never loved him. And I don’t know why. Maybe he never should’ve had children, or maybe it was something about Chad. But I adored him. I did, I still do.