Early Warning

Henry said only that Rosanna seemed more than fine when she arrived in Chicago: talkative, and pleased with herself. Went in to take a rest, which was certainly understandable — it was a long drive — and then he had heard something but he didn’t know what. At the funeral, everyone had agreed, what a good death, you had to go sometime, she had retained her faculties to the end, and she had eaten whatever she pleased whenever she pleased. In short, life was doing what you wanted to do in the way you wanted to do it, and may she rest in peace. Even this new Pastor Campbell, supposedly quite strict, had stood there at the pulpit and talked about Rosanna’s showing evidence of God’s grace in her generosity of spirit. Then they laid her next to Walter, and soon they would tear down the house, fill in the foundation, plow the field, and plant the beans; there was a completeness to it that Lillian knew her mother would have considered right and just. No one, not even the dead person herself, minded this death as much as Lillian did. She went up the stairs and opened the door (when had it ever been locked?).

Lillian’s eyes adjusted, and she saw how Rosanna had left the room, the afghan folded over the back of the sofa, the September issue of McCall’s on the side table, the TV Guide on top of it, dated the week of September 30. Beside the sofa, Rosanna’s basket of yarn, half-skeins and balled-up remnants in pinks and blues on the top. Thrust among them was a pattern book open to a pineapple-lace pattern. Lillian couldn’t knit a twenty-stitch row without dropping five stitches, but Debbie had already knitted the baby two hats, a pair of booties, and a blanket. And her husband, Hugh, the only handy intellectual Lillian had ever seen, was building a cradle based on a model from Amish country. Hugh’s specialty was the history of Dutch Reformed settlement in America, which was why, Lillian thought, he could build and think at the same time. But he was systematic and literal-minded, and though he loved Debbie very much, Lillian had hoped her daughter would end up with someone handsomer and more romantic, someone, in fact, more like Arthur. Tina had a boyfriend, too — another art student, who specialized in giant paintings of galaxies, where each dot of paint represented a star. Tina had explained to Lillian that impossibility was the sign of art. She herself was doing collages of torn food packaging made to look like animals.

The darkness wasn’t dark anymore. Lillian sat down in the rocking chair and gazed around the room. She suddenly remembered Rosanna sitting in this very chair, also at twilight, softly singing the song that Lillian knew from her earliest days was “her” song—“God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall.” “He paints the lily of the field, / Perfumes each lily bell; / If He so loves the little flow’rs, / I know He loves me well.” In those days, Rosanna had had a light, tuneful voice, and Lillian had asked for it over and over, as children do. Now she hummed it, and realized that she had lived an unusual life for only one reason, and that reason was that she’d known true love from the day she was born. Then she handed herself off, as if by instinct, to Arthur, passing through town, and he had also loved her truly and faithfully.

Looking around the room, though, tired and sad that this space was doomed, she understood that Rosanna’s love had required a sacrificial victim, and that had been Mary Elizabeth. No one knew how Mary Elizabeth had come to fall backward and hit her head on the corner of the egg crate. Rosanna said that there had been a simultaneous flash of lightning and clap of thunder — Mary Elizabeth, who was dancing about, was startled, slipped, and fell. Andy, though, had said years ago, in that questioning way she had, that Frank took the blame — he’d been arguing with Joe about something and scuffing his feet on the rag rug; when it shifted, Mary Elizabeth fell backward. Not daring to ask Frank, Lillian had once asked Joe, who said he didn’t think that Frank, at five and a half, would have been able to move the rug — it had been a heavy thing. All he remembered was that, when Rosanna and Walter talked about it to the boys, Rosanna had said that it was the hand of God taking his beloved child to himself, and Walter had nodded in agreement. Joe didn’t know what Walter might have said when the boys were older. What had Mary Elizabeth been like? Joe shook his head. He barely remembered her — he was only three and a half when she died.