The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,50

depended on the person. Well of course, she said, everything depended on the person, but the meat of the thing was this: you accept change in your life or you might as well be dead.

I looked down, and I said perhaps it was difficult for some people to accept certain changes, that it took some getting used to. She stopped working and leaned toward me. I could smell peppermint on her breath. She said, “Oh. I see. You’re having a hard time with it, is that it?” I said I thought I was, but that I might be getting better now, that this trip had helped me. She said well, that’s good. Then she sat back and said, you know, I’ll tell you the truth. It hurt me at first, too. But then it was over, and I saw I’d just been scared of it, that’s all, big black thing coming down the road at me all dressed up like death hisself. But then! Why, I come to see it was just a little pocket in my life, a small place, really. I remember telling my friend Katherine about it, she was a few years older than me, she was out hanging the sheets and I was setting on her back steps. I remember thinking it was the last day she’d get to do this for a while, the weather was turning. Anyway, I said, Katherine? I think I’m over all that blue way of thinking. And Katherine, she had her clothespins stuck in her mouth and she took them out and looked at me and said, well now, what did I tell you? You were running around waiting for something so terrible to happen. Like a big wing was going to grow out your forehead, you’d be some kind of freak, when the truth is, happens to every one of us. Think of the poor men, she said, they got to go bald. And then they can’t even do it no more and that’s about 99 percent of their lives!

Eugenie said Katherine had chickens on her farm, and there were feathers on the ground here and there. What could I do, she said, but stick one of them feathers on my forehead and then call Katherine? Yoo hoo, I said. Does it look very bad? We ’bout busted a gut, she said. Relief, that’s all, the two of us saying I’m right here with you, don’t you be scared. That’s one thing about people, Nan, you always got a lot of folks right with you.

Then she asked if I were one of them authors. I said no. I said I kept a journal, that’s all. She said, Well, come in the house anyway, I’d like to show you something.

I followed her in, and she handed me a thin stack of papers, folded into thirds and tied with a wide blue ribbon. These are poems my husband wrote me, she said—she pronounced it “pomes.” I’d like you to read them. I’ll make us some blackberry tea.

I sat at the kitchen table and read his poems and I had a thought to ask her if I could copy them, but I didn’t. They were beautiful things, I remember one was about him looking at the flowers in their garden. He wrote something like, what were we, that we got to witness such a thing. He said that when he saw the shade of burgundy on one petal progress to a pale shade of pink, he couldn’t do anything but stand there with his hands at his sides, and that the emptiness of his hands felt heavy. And that that was how he felt about Eugenie, he would be coming in from the fields at night and see the light on in the kitchen and his hands would feel heavy again.

I wish I had copied them. I would like to read them again now. Anyway, I told Eugenie I thought they were wonderful. She sat down at the table with me, nodded, said, Yes, I think he was a regular Shakespeare type. But you know, he never did show me them poems. I found them buried in his bottom dresser drawer. I think he thought they weren’t good enough. She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes. Her lids looked like tissue paper, but the blue of her iris was still strong and clear. He was a good man, she said. I never did hear him complain. He never was the kind