Florida Read Online Free PDF

bright in the hospital window and someone in the room was breathing. There was a weight on his chest, and when he looked down, he found the woman’s sleeping head. For a moment, he didn’t know who she was. By the time he identified her, the feeling of unknowing had burrowed in. He would never know her; knowledge of another person was ungraspable, a cloud. He would never begin to hold another in his mind like an equation, pure and entire. He focused on the part of her thin hair, which in the darkness and closeness looked like inept stitches in white wax. He stared at the part until the horror faded, until her smell, the bitterness of unwashed hair, the lavender soap she used on her face, rose to him, and he put his nose against her warmth and inhaled her.
    At dawn, she woke. Her cheek was creased from the folds in his gown. She looked at him wildly and he laughed, and she rubbed the drool from the corner of her mouth and turned away as if disappointed. He married her because to not do so had ceased to be an option during the night.
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    While he was learning how to walk again, he had a letter from the university down in Florida that made a tremendous offer for his father’s land.
    And so, instead of the honeymoon trip to the Thousand Islands, pines and cold water and his wife’s bikinipressing into the dough of her flesh, they took a sleeping train down to Florida and walked in the heat to the edge of the university campus. Where he remembered vast oak hummocks, there were rectilinear brick buildings. Mossy pools were now parking lots.
    Only his father’s property, one hundred acres, was overgrown with palmettos and vines. He brushed the red bugs off his wife’s sensible travel pants and carried her into his father’s house. Termites had chiseled long gouges in the floorboards, but the sturdy Cracker house had kept out most of the wilderness. His wife touched the mantel made of heart pine and turned to him gladly. Later, after he came home with a box of groceries and found the kitchen scrubbed clean, he heard three thumps upstairs and ran up to find that she had killed a black snake in the bathtub with her bare heel and was laughing at herself in amazement.
    How magnificent he found her, a Valkyrie, half naked and warlike with that dead snake at her feet. In her body, the culmination of all things. He didn’t say it, of course; he couldn’t. He only reached and put his hands upon her.
    In the night, she rolled toward him and took his ankles between her own. All right, she said. We can stay.
    I didn’t say anything, he said.
    And she smiled a little bitterly and said, Well. You don’t.
    They moved their things into the house where he was born. They put in air-conditioning, renovated thestructure, put on large additions. His wife opened a shop and drove to Miami and Atlanta to stock it with antiques. He sold his father’s land, but slowly, in small pieces, at prices that rose dizzyingly with each sale. The numbers lived in him, warmed him, brought him a buzzing kind of joy. Jude made investments so shrewd that when he and his wife were in their mid-thirties, he opened a bottle of wine and announced that neither of them would ever have to work again. His wife laughed and drank but kept up with the store. When she was almost too old, they had a daughter and named her after his mother.
    When he held the baby at home for the first time, he understood he had never been so terrified of anything as he was of this mottled lump of flesh. How easily he could break her without meaning to. She could slip from his hands and crack open on the floor; she could catch pneumonia when he bathed her; he could say a terrible thing in anger and she would shrivel. All the mistakes he could make telescoped before him. His wife saw him turn pale and plucked the baby from his hands just before he crashed down. When he came to, she was livid but calm. He protested, but she put the baby in his