under the earth

After my husbands death I continued to live in our house. I grew up in it, and we lived there still after our marriage and I saw no need to move away from the place that had been my home for so long. There would have been little comfort for me in going with company to the seaside, though my friends asked and told me that I was still young and a marriage of two years shouldn’t be my whole life. In a way I agreed with them, knowing I had a weight to lay down, and yet something drew me to stay in this place. Perhaps it was an intuition to wait in the place where you lost something. Somehow I felt that the weight of grief and love was not mine alone but was also shared by this place in which he lived. Sometimes I felt myself imploring with the blue square of sky that was always mine and with the pigeons on the line to carry away my love because they could love better and my love was a weary love for something gone. As my feet sank down in the dew in the early morning and as my hands moved the dirt in the garden I spoke with the ground and pleaded that it take away my grief.

His death was an accident in Europe and so I didn’t see his burial. I think this is why I felt a particular need towards the earth, because whatever it is that goes out of the hearts of those who loved as they stand at the grave, whatever it is that they put away as they put the body in the ground, had not gone out of me and was the heaviness that made me live alone like an old woman at twenty four. Perhaps this is why I stayed on my own property thinking that the land which knew me might be generous in giving what I asked of it.

I spent my days almost entirely in the garden, I felt a comfort in turning over the earth and growing the food I live on. I grew mostly vegetables, flowers confuse me. They grow and die and give no reason, except a loud blare of color. The ones I grew, I grew only because they were his.

When he died a few things were sent to me, a rosary he sometimes carried with him, and a bundle of letters – mine – written in my own hand. I felt a bitter loneliness in this. They did not send his wedding ring, his watch or glasses. They didn’t send any part of his clothes or the contents of his suitcase, not even any of the books he had been reading, or his notebooks. I would have read those and felt close to him and the days before he died. They only sent my own words back to me, mostly letters I wrote to him while he was in Europe, and a few from the early days of our love-writing. I couldn’t throw them out. They bothered me: I loved them, but they hurt me. They spoke to me more of me than of him, they spoke to me of myself completely wrapped up in him, of myself when I moved between myself and him and noticed no difference. I left them on the table where I first unwrapped them and I felt their presence in the room as I came through it. The announced to me so loudly the thoughts I tried so hard not to think, that I can now only find him through myself, that all I have left of him are the things I wrote of him inside my head. I almost hated them, but I couldn’t remove them, and I spent more time in the garden.

As the reality of his death settled into me, my thoughts traveled over and over our years together, each moment looking different to me as I lived through it again in my head. Then there came a different period of thought, when I didn’t think as much about him, and my thoughts found themselves abruptly in different places, in my childhood, in books I had read, in memories of school friends, in days and places which I had never thought of again after they passed.

An incident in the garden one day took me to a memory of my very early years, which I had all but forgotten about. I was looking in a squash plant for yellow buds, and as I stepped back I felt something flutter against my ankle. Turning, I saw that my foot had crushed a large butterfly. I looked closer and was caught by how startlingly delicate it was, perhaps more so because it’s body was broken and indistinguishable, and a wing was partly impressed into the soil.

I was suddenly in a memory of being five, in a white dress on the porch in the morning. A night moth was moving in spasms against the house, and I tried to help it fly away, but instead it flew again and again into the wall, then went still. I held it in my hands, and understood. I went inside and found a glycerin soap box, filled it with bits of silk from my mothers scraps, and laid the moth inside with one piece of orange silk pulled over it. I shut the lid, then dug a hole under the four-o’-clocks and covered the box again. I put a pebble to mark the place. I felt so strange about it, I felt stiff, and very aware of my arms and legs inside my dress.

The memory of this childhood day affected me, and I went into the house to look for a box or paper or fabric of some kind. My eyes fell on the letters. Yes. I took the top one and wrapped the butterfly in the tissue of the letter then put it in the envelope again and sealed it. My hands trembled. I realized then that I intensely wanted to put the letter in the ground, to bury it, to have it away from me. There were still four-o’-clocks by the wall.

That was the beginning. Afterwards there were moths, more butterflys, june bugs and beetles, a few small birds and a mouse. I buried any small soulless creature and asked them to take my dead with them. On the last letter the moth’s wings fluttered. I waited till it was still, closed it in the paper, and let it sleep under my garden.