A Reliable Wife Read Free Page B

yet dead. She was safe. She was in Virginia, where she had been
     born.
    Her mother’s golden hair was lit by the reflection from an elaborate lavender silk dress, her skirts voluminous and extravagantly
     decorated. She drove a large and simple carriage, and Catherine sat in the front seat, between her mother and a man, a military
     man who was not her father. In her memory, as it came to her, she could not see his face. Behind them, straight as pins, sat
     three other young men, cadets, smartly dressed in tight wool uniforms with epaulets and braids and stripes.
    It had rained on the way, a quick, fierce downpour, and the hood of the carriage had been drawn over, and the rain fell even
     though the sun never stopped shining on them, such a thick rain she had barely been able to see as far as the horses’ steaming
     flanks. Then, miraculous and beautiful, the rain had stopped and the hood had been drawn back by one of the young men so the
     sweet cool air had flowed around them. The hood sprinkled her mother’s hair with tiny droplets, and her mother had laughed
     in a charming way. It was such a clear memory, the sound of it. That and the weather and the storm itself had been nice. Lovely,
     long ago.
    The young soldier behind her had whispered in Catherine’s ear and pointed as a rainbow appeared. She could still smell, all
     these years later, the sweet sweat of his young body in his immaculate uniform. She could remember it better than all the
     rest of her childhood, better than the mountains of Virginia that lay beyond where the rainbow shone. She could feel his voice
     vibrating against the thin bones of her chest, a deep tingling beneath her skin. He whispered something about a pot of gold
     that was meant to lie waiting for her, just there at the rainbow’s end.
    Such a miracle. The sun had never stopped shining and the rain had stopped and a marvelous sunset blossomed. The intoxicating
     light gave every face a beauty, and the sweetness and freshness of the air lightened every heart. She sat between her mother
     who was not yet dead and a soldier who was not her father in a countryside she could no longer remember on a road she hardly
     saw and she thought: I am perfectly happy.
    It was the last time in her whole life she remembered having such a thought. She had no idea who the men were. She had no
     memory of where they were going or how they came to be going together or what happened to them all once they got there. Something
     ceremonial, the Civil War dead, the endless young boys and men whose ghosts walked the land, some memorial with rising furling
     flags and trumpets and a long slow beating of drums. She did not know where her father was that day, leaving her mother and
     herself to drive through rain and rainbows and sunsets with four handsome soldiers.
    But now she remembered her lovely mother who had died when she was seven, giving birth to her sister Alice, and she missed
     her. She remembered the men. She remembered the way they smelled, the way their young arms filled the sleeves of the jackets
     and the white stiff collars scraping against their razored necks, the rasp of masculinity, and that had been the beginning,
     the beginning of all that had come after.
    It was, she realized now, the beginning of desire. It was glory, the light, and the crimson clouds. It was the face of Jesus.
     It was love. Love without end. Desire without object. She had never known or felt it since.
    From that beginning she had gone on and on, until her legs were tired and her mother was dead and her heart was broken. She
     had, no matter how impossible it seemed from moment to moment, gone on without love or money, always wondering when it would
     begin, the splendid end to match the splendid beginning.
    She no longer dwelled on the past. She had no fond memories there, except for the single rainbow, the pot of gold. She had
     bitten and bludgeoned her way through life, angry, fighting in a rage for the next good