They left for Iowa in Ollie’s Pontiac.
“There’s the house,” said Ollie, indicating a lonely structure just off the road, with two miserable-looking automobiles sitting in the mud in front. Earl looked out his window and felt a shiver go through him.
“Easy,” said Ollie behind the wheel. “It’ll be easy. We’ll have to sort of check around for a while, of course.”
Earl’s fingers wrapped around the arm of his door in an involuntary, convulsive grip, still staring out the window, not recognizing anything but a blur of muted browns and grays from the ditch, hearing far away Ollie’s excited voice.
“Come on, Earl, snap out of it. We can turn around up here, make a sweep back. Hell, who knows what he got on ’im? Hey, what do you think?”
“Sure,” said Earl absently.
“There, down there along the creek it winds all the way back up to the barn. Hey, does that look OK to you?”
“Sure.”
Ollie looked at him with anger, but let it pass. “Boy, you’ve been queer lately,” he said and drove around the block to take another look at the house. They met an old pickup and the driver waved at them.
“Friendly bastards around here,” said Ollie.
Earl had taken the bullets from his .45 Army automatic and was intermittently cocking it and firing it dry, making little snapping noises.
July sat in his bedroom and felt like a plant with its roots cut. From his bed he looked at the partially opened closet door and thought over his life and what if any opportunities lay before him. Days passed like ugly, slow-moving trucks. He thought about Mal and he thought on and on. Some of it was incomprehensible. He would repeat things over and over—he would begin a thought with “We used to come home and . . .” and would lose track of the rest and begin it again: “We used to come home and . . .” and still not be able to finish, and would start it again, but stop, abandoned in the same narcotic image. He knew that what he was doing was wrong. Some things were clearer than they had been. He saw that he was not succeeding in resurrecting Mal, but only her death—making it a living occurrence that happened again and again. He knew in his right mind that he must divorce her from his mental image of her—because he was killing her now—he was making her into what she never was. The light of his life, he was chaining her to himself and making her drag him through the mud. He knew it was wrong, but it was his grief thinking for him, because if he gave her up there would be nothing left of him—a small peanut of a person, wrinkled and unable to live in the world. There were three relationships that he was concerned with: Mal when she was alone with herself; himself alone; and the relationship they had between them. Now, with her gone, two thirds of his life was missing.
There was a talking voice in him that insisted at different times that he knew what he was supposed to do. He knew he should give her up—that is, forget about her and go on normally, make new contacts and get into some different thoughts and experiences and let them work on him like health specialists. That would be the mature, gentlemanly way to go about his affairs with that sickening, stoic, smiling bravery. But he just didn’t think he could do that. It seemed that moral indignation itself would crucify him if he tried it.
No, it was not that he had loved her once that was causing him so much grief. It was that he must love her twice: once when she was alive and once when she was dead. He must love her morenow, because it was only through his love that she could be alive, as it was only she in his life that brought him happiness. She was the key. Without her the whole world lived in misery. So it wasn’t the first time that he had loved her (in which he was guilty of not having realized how uproariously happy he was) that tortured him now and threatened to snap him like a stick. It was the second time. It was loving her dead. But then his mind cried out unexpectedly, louder than his grief: You fool, love her once, love her alive. You participated in happiness with her: life gave it to you both: her death changes nothing finally. Cut her loose. The dead aren’t dead. Love her living, not death.
But I can’t, he thought. I just don’t think I can do that. I only understand things emotionally. My habits and feelings have the power over me. Coward! cried his conscience.
Going to sleep seemed to be impossible. He got up and went downstairs. Sitting on the sofa, he felt an urge to make something with wood. Bringing up several boards, a hammer and two jars of nails from the basement, he dumped them on the floor and gave up the project as quickly as he had conceived it because of not being able to think of anything to make. Returning to the sofa, he sat and stared at a slender red clay vase on the table in front of him, the dried stalks of wildflowers wilted and bent now like burned lizards. He looked at it for a long time without really realizing what it was, then remembered Mal had picked those flowers, had snipped them off and put them in there with several inches of water to prolong their flush petals and fragrance, but
