I walked naked into the lightning

“I was baking a pie,” Rose said softly, then she grew quiet again. Those were the first words she had spoken since her arrival three days ago. The doctor waited a moment to see if she would say more, then gently touched her hand. She started, seemingly shaken out of a reverie. That often happened with patients after a round of electroshock therapy. They lost some short-term memory, and they frequently would stop talking mid-conversation.

 

Rose glanced at the doctor, then down at the slim volume of poetry in her hand. “There are books here,” she said. “After so many years without them, I found rows and row and rows. And usually, I have them all to myself, in a quiet, dusty room away from the screamers and the droolers and the dribblers.” She grimaced as she said that, then went on. “I was six when my Ma sent me to live with Sarah and John Garrett, to cook and clean for them. Sarah taught me my thees and my thous, and that good Quakers didn’t use Mr. or Mrs., so that I should call her Sarah, if you please. Sarah is the one who taught me to read, starting with the Blue Fairy Book, which had the story of Snow White and Rose Red in it. She started calling me Rose Red when she saw how much I loved that the girl in the fairy tale had my very own name.”

“She also taught me how to take care of a house, and even had a rhyme for it:

Wash on Monday

Iron on Tuesday

Mend on Wednesday

Market on Thursday

Clean on Friday

Bake on Saturday

Rest on Sunday.”

Rose looked over at the doctor. “That doesn’t rhyme, does it? But that’s how we remembered the days. Saturdays were my favorite, and I loved making pies. We’d take the extra dough and roll jelly inside, and those were special treats for me on Sundays. They didn’t have any kids of their own, you see, so I was it.”

Rose grew silent and looked out the window. Just as the doctor was about to prompt her again, she went on.

“Last Saturday was one of those hot, sticky August afternoons when the air just seems so thick you could cut it with a knife. Richard – he’s my youngest boy – had brought me a pail full of ripe blackberries, and I was in the kitchen kneading dough for a pie. I had the window open, and although there was a bit of a breeze that day, with a fire burning in the cookstove, it was almost too hot to breathe. I grabbed an ice cube from the bowl of ice water I was using to make the crust and closed my eyes as I slowly ran it over the back of my neck.

BAM! went the sound of a gunshot nearby, and I thought irritably about that damned groundhog Bill had been after, when I heard Billy screaming from the direction of the barn. A high-pitched sound, more like a woman than a 16-year-old boy, and I dropped the ice cube and spun around, sending the crock of sugar crashing to the floor as I rushed outside.

It was dark in the barn, with one brilliant beam of sunlight slanting in through a missing board, catching specks of dust and hay floating in the air.” Rose looked up at the doctor again. “Isn’t it strange the things that stick in your mind? I didn’t see Billy at first, but I heard ragged sobs coming from behind the old tractor.”

There was another long pause, and Rose looked down at her hands, turning them over and over, palms up, palms down. When she continued, her voice was almost too low to hear.

“There was so much blood. At first, my mind didn’t register what it was seeing, ya ken? Billy was crouched down next to Bill, his arms bloody up past his elbows, rocking back and forth. I touched his shoulder, and he screamed again, jumped up and fled the barn, almost knocking me over. And I was left alone with what was left of my husband.

Most of his head was blown clean off, his rifle lying next to him like a guilty lover caught in the act. My mind sort of shut down then, went off on a trip somewhere, while the part of me that remained observed everything from some safe corner. I remember kneeling next to him, and taking his hand in mine, and how warm it felt. I remember how far away he seemed, like our hands were somehow across the room and not connected to me at all. There was blood and bone on the wall in some odd pattern, and I remember looking at it, thinking that if part of his brain was on the wall, did the barn now know what he was thinking when he did it? And I remember feeling nothing, just a strange floaty calm, like I wasn’t me at all. Except for the pennies. They nagged at the edge of my calm for some reason.”

The doctor looked puzzled. “Pennies?” he asked, and Rose looked up, startled, like she’d forgotten someone else was in the room.

“My Da’s family came from Ireland – the McGraws – and he always said that you must place pennies on the eyes of the dead, or else they can’t cross into Heaven. Bill only had one eye left; the other was somewhere in that pattern on the wall. I reached into his pocket, but he had no coins there, only a pocketknife. So I stood and walked back to the house and into the kitchen. On a shelf near the sink was a jar of coins. I dumped it out on the floured surface of the table and pocketed two pennies. Walking back towards the door, I noticed the floor in sharp detail – the black and white tiled pattern, bits of broken crockery, my bare footprints in the spilled sugar. My eyes fixated on a single drop of blood next to a footprint, and I stood there for a moment, looking down at the black, white and red. It was oddly beautiful, like something from the tales I’d loved as a child. Snow White, Rose Red.

 

Was I Rose Red today?

Back in the barn, I gently placed one coin on Bill’s remaining eye, moving his hair away from what remained of his forehead, then absently wiping the blood off my hands and onto my dress. I hadn’t seen Billy since he’d fled from the barn, but I knew that Larry and Richard were playing with the boys who lived up the hill in the Robinson’s farmhouse.

My memories get fuzzy at this point. I think I must’ve gone up there, asked Polly to use her phone and to keep my boys with her. I think I asked her to see if she could find out where Billy’d run off to. I have vague impressions of people arriving and of answering questions in Polly’s kitchen, but my strongest memory is of my hand in the pocket of my dress, turning that second penny over and over again.

The next thing I remember, it was night, and that penny was in my mouth, the taste of bright copper so like blood. I was walking barefoot on the road, with a quarter moon rising through the trees, leeching the colors from the world. My hands, stained by blackberries and blood, looked black in the moonlight, but no matter how much I wiped them on my dress, they wouldn’t come clean. The night hadn’t brought with it any cooler air, and between the heat and the bloodstains, at some point I guess I took off my dress and left it on the road. I didn’t wear britches in the summertime – too hot for that nonsense – and I remember feeling… free as I walked West. I encountered no one – isn’t that odd? Must have been a good seven miles between the farm and when I started to see the glow of West Chester over a rise in the road.

When the cop pulled up next to me, right as I entered the town, I stopped and let him take my hands in his. He looked at the stains on them, tried not to look at me in my altogether, and asked me what had happened.”

 

Rose looked up at the doctor. “I told him that it was Saturday, so I’d been baking a pie.” The doctor was quiet a moment, then gestured to the book of poetry. “And that?” he asked. Rose opened to a page near the middle and read a bit of a poem called “The Return,” by F. V. Branford.

“I stood under water, and over stars,

I cast Life from me,

I handled Death,

I walked naked into the lightning,

I had so great a thirst for God.”

“I’m not sure about that last bit,” she said. “I think that if there is a God, he’s a bit of a bastard. But you wanted to know what happened, so there you have it. I was baking a pie.”

And with that, Rose stood up, left the book of poems on the chair, and left the room.