Rose Madder

at the top, underlined, capitalized, and exclamation-pointed (pork chops were always Norman’s favorite), is the blue packet with the spatter of red-purple drops ru

“Please,” she says, not knowing if she prays, or for whom the prayer is intended if she does. In any case, she is answered, after a fashion. There is a short, sharp bark. There’s no pity in it, no compassion, no gentleness. It is impatient. Don’t fuck with me, it says. Rosie looks up and sees the vixen on the far side of the clearing, standing motionless and looking at her. Her brush is up. It flames like a torch against the dull gray sky overhead.

“Please,” she says again in a low, troubled voice.

“Please don’t let me be what I’m afraid of. Please… just please help me keep my temper and remember the tree.” There is nothing she can interpret as an answer, not even another of those impatient barks. The vixen only stands there. Its tongue is out now, and it is panting. To Rosie it appears to be gri

“Please,” Rosie whispers, one final time, and then she leaves. And as she drives the Skyway, on her way back to what she hopes is her life, she throws the last piece of her old life-the bag she brought with her out of Egypt-out the driver’s-side window and into Coori Bay.

The rages have departed. The child, Pamela, is far from grown, but she is old enough to have her own friends, to have developed applebud breasts, to have begun her monthly courses. Old enough so she and her mother have started to argue about clothes and nights out and nights in and what she may do and whom she may see and for how long. The hurricane season of Pam’s adolescence has not fully started yet, but Rosie knows it is coming. She views it with equanimity, however, because the rages have departed. Bill’s hair has gone mostly gray and started to recede. Rosie’s is still brown. She wears it simply, around her shoulders. She sometimes puts it up, but never plaits it. It is years since they have picnicked out at Shoreland, on State Highway 27; Bill seems to have forgotten about it when he sold his Harley-Davidson, and he sold the Harley because, he said, “My reflexes are too slow, Rosie. When your pleasures become risks, it’s time to cut them out.” She doesn’t argue this idea, but it seems to her that Bill has sold a huge batch of memories along with his scoot, and she mourns these. It is as if much of his youth was tucked into its saddlebags, and he forgot to check and take it out before the nice young man from Evanston drove the motorcycle away. They don’t picnic there anymore, but once a year, always in the spring, Rosie goes out by herself. She has watched the new tree grow in the shadow of the old fallen one from a sprig to a twig to a sturdy young growth with a smooth, straight trunk and confident branches. She has watched it raise itself, year by year, in the clearing where no fox-cubs now gambol. She sits before it silently, sometimes for as long as an hour, with her hands folded neatly in her lap. She does not come here to worship or to pray, but she has a sense of tightness and ritual about being here, a sense of duty fulfilled, of some unstated covenant’s renewal. And if being here helps keep her from hurting anyone-Bill, Pammy, Rhoda, Curt (Rob Lefferts is not a worry; the year Pammy turned five, he died quietly of a heart attack)-then it is time well-spent. How perfectly this tree grows! Already its young branches are densely dressed in narrow leaves of a dark green hue, and in the last two years she has seen hard flashes of color deep within those leaves-blossoms which will, in this tree’s later years, become fruit. If someone were to happen by this clearing and eat of that fruit, Rosie is sure the result would be death, and a hideous death, at that. She worries about it, from time to time, but until she sees signs that other people have been there, she doesn’t worry overmuch. So far she has seen no such sign, not so much as a single beercan, cigarette pack, or gum wrapper. Now it is enough simply to come here, and to fold her clear, unblemished hands in her lap, and look at the tree of her rage and the hard splashes of rose madder that will become, in later years, the numb-sweet fruit of death. Sometimes as she sits before this little tree, she sings.

“I’m really Rosie,” she sings, “and I’m Rosie Real… you better believe me… I’m a great big deal…” She isn’t a big deal, of course, except to the people who matter in her life, but since these are the only ones she cares about, that’s fine. All accounts balance, as the woman in the zat might have said. She has reached safe harbor, and on these spring mornings near the lake, sitting in the overgrown, silent clearing which has never changed over all the years (it is very like a picture, that way-the sort of humdrum painting one might find in an old curio shop, or a pawn-and-loan), her legs folded beneath her, she sometimes feels a gratitude so full that she thinks her heart can hold no more, ever. It is this gratitude that makes her sing. She must sing. There is no other choice. And sometimes the vixen-old now, her own years of bearing long behind her, her brilliant brush streaked with wiry threads of gray-comes to the edge of the clearing, and stands, and seems to listen to Rosie sing. Her black eyes as she stands there communicate no clear thought to Rosie, but it is impossible to mistake the essential sanity of the old and clever brain behind them.

June 10, 1993-November 17, 1994