The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove Read Online Free PDF Page B

while Heath labored in the fields. Occasionally I attempted a watercolor or worked at sculptures that I constructed from baling wire, old bolts and broken parts of farm equipment. I worked at my journal and poems. I practiced at our upright piano and over the years taught myself six Chopin nocturnes. On occasion I would play one of them for Heath as he sat so weary in his chair at the end of the day, and he seemed genuinely proud of me, sweetly applauding when I finished.
    I had supper ready on time and Heath was always grateful for whatever I cooked for him; but early in our life together I perceived something—he was uncomplaining, but I could see that he did not favor French cuisine. So I prepared potatoes, soft vegetables and red meat for him, which he ate hungrily in his weariness.
    Our life together was not as I had imagined it—but I allowed myself no lingering bitterness. I had no right to feel cheated. Heath had not lied to me. I had romanced and misperceived—had allowed myself to misjudge things, had manufactured my own dreams. We were Adam and Eve—but the serpent had come and gone. And I was far from home.
    Heath had no choice but to do the work. I had nowhere to go beyond the farm, no one to talk to, nothing to do but cook, clean, read books, listen to music, work occasionally at my art, and tend the garden. Our rural neighbors—warm-hearted, generous people—do not speak of Mallarmé, de Beauvoir, Poulenc or Vuillard. Western Wisconsin Technical College is not the Sorbonne. I learned to be alone.
    But how could I begrudge or be angry with Heath, who had stayed beautiful, loving, and true to his end—when he died of a farm accident, his tractor tipping over on him as he wearily turned a row at the edge of a rain-logged field. He’d grown less careful and alert about such things as he aged and his energies lessened. I found him crushed and bled to death in the weeds. It was the day of our wedding anniversary and we had planned to celebrate that evening with a sirloin dinner at the Driftless Tavern. I will not recover from the horror of his death. Ours was a quiet, misconceived life—but there was love, we did our work, endured and remained devoted.
    I regret that I always must have seemed a tinge sad to him, but he grew to accept this as my nature.

    T HE HEAD nurse from the care home called again to press me for a decision, and I have agreed to take their room. She visited my house with several assistants to have me sign papers. These women, I realized, were also taking stock of me. They were overly cheerful and laughed a great deal, but seemed puzzled, almost mildly threatened, by my houseful of books, recordings, and pictures. We sat in my living room and I gave them coffee. They admired the view from my windows.
    I do not know what they concluded from their visit, but I felt myself being discussed as their car disappeared down my road. We made arrangements for their van to pick me up with a small load of my possessions, and they gave me an imposing pamphlet of rules and regulations with a color picture on the cover of relentlessly happy-looking elders opening gift packages.
    I read everything carefully. There are a number of rules, some of them daunting, many of them threatening and cold. For instance, rule sixteen reads: “More than three (3) emergency calls in one month from an apartment to the switchboard shall be conclusive evidence to landlord that occupant is not capable of independent living. Landlord can then have tenant moved to such health care facility as available.”

C HAPTER 3
    Cyril
    T he sheriff and his deputy told me I looked like a quarter pickup load of grape popsicles when they found me on the road. They’d been looking for Balaclava after he jumped paying for his gas at the Mobil, and the station attendant had told them that he was pretty sure someone might have been abducted into the thief’s car before it went flying off into the blizzard.
    So the officers put on their