What Verna Said

It was the Sunday night, the twenty-third of March, three days before the Wednesday, and Tessa Bright had gone up to bed at half past nine, as she had every night for two weeks, and the half hour between nine-thirty and ten belonged to the other two, which was a thing all three of them had noticed and none of them had ever mentioned.

The kitchen was quiet. The stove was down to embers. Verna Kelleher was still at the table with the sheet in front of her and the pencil in her hand, doing the Sunday column, which had been the last thing she had done every Sunday for six years.

Wade Kelleher came in from the barn and stood at the end of the table with his coat on and his hat in his hand.

"I want to ask you for something," he said.

"I know what you want."

"Then you know what I'm going to say, and I'm going to say it anyway." He put the hat down on the table. "I want the money. Not all of it. I want a thousand of it. She's going down there Wednesday with forty-one dollars and a coat that doesn't fit her, and there's a woman in Plattsburgh she can board with for a while, and I want to send her with something to start, and I want it out of the account, and I want it to be a loan from you to me, and I'll pay it back inside a year if I have to cut every tree on that woodlot with a hand saw."

Verna Kelleher put the pencil down.

It was, as I have said, a household in which nobody in six years had ever raised a voice, and Verna Kelleher did not raise hers now. She turned in the chair and looked at him and folded her hands in her lap the way she folded them when she had decided something, and she said:

"No."

"Verna."

"No. And I'll tell you why, and then we won't talk about it again, and you'll do me the courtesy of hearing the whole of it, because I've heard the whole of yours for six years and I've never once made you do it in front of me."

"All right."

"You want my mother's money to give to that girl."

"I want money to send her away with her dignity."

"You want my mother's money to give to that girl, or to go with her. Don't lie to me, Wade. You have never lied to me, not once, not in six years, and it's the only thing I have that's worth anything, and I'd ask you not to throw it away on a Sunday night."

He did not answer her.

"Because I know," Verna said. "Do you think I don't know? I've known since the fifth of March. I knew when I came in that door and the front room was warm. It wasn't the stove and it wasn't the ashes and it wasn't the doughnut wire in the grate, though I found that too. It was that the house smelled of people being happy in it, and a house in which nobody has been happy for nine years smells different afterward, and I stood in that doorway for about four seconds and I knew everything that had happened in this house while I was in Malone, and everything that hadn't happened, and I want you to understand that the second part is the part that hurt me. You didn't do anything. I know you didn't do anything. If you had done something I could have thrown you out and been a woman with something to be angry about, and there are nights in this last month when I would have given a year of my life to have something to be angry about."

He said, "Verna — "

"Let me finish." She smoothed the sheet on the table with the flat of her hand, which she did when she was working, and did not look at it. "You want to know what I've had out of this. I'll tell you. I had four months of your mother, which you have never once thanked me for and which I have never once asked you to, and I want you to know that I have counted those four months, every night since, and I don't like that I count them, and that doesn't stop me counting them. And I had six years of a farm that was going under, and I had the sheet on the wall, and I had the pills, and I had a specialist in Malone calling me a case, and there was nobody carrying me. Not one day. Not one hour. I mean that literally. There has not been one hour in eleven years in which somebody else carried this and I could put it down."

Nobody in that house in thirty years had ever heard Verna Kelleher speak this many consecutive sentences, and the effect on the man standing at the end of the table was not what the county would have predicted.

"I know it," Wade Kelleher said.

"I know you know it. That's the trouble." She looked up at him for the first time. "That's the whole trouble, the both of us knowing it. And here's the rest of it, and this is the part I want you to hear, because I've thought about it for a month and I've decided I'm entitled to say it. She's nineteen. She came here in November with two bags and a coat that doesn't fit her, and she can clean and she can cook and she can sing, and in November she thought she was going to be a nurse's aide like I was, or a hairdresser, or married to somebody like that Blaine boy from the feed store, and she has got the whole of everything in front of her. You send her down to Plattsburgh on Wednesday with two hundred dollars in her pocket and she'll be all right by June. She'll be all right by June. And I'll be fifty-nine years old in this chair with a thyroid and a back and a sheet on the wall, and I'll be here. Do you see. That's not a comparison, it's a ledger, and I've been keeping the ledger of this house for six years and I'm the one that knows what's left in it, and what's left in it is that chair inside that door and nobody else."

Wade Kelleher stood at the table and understood, in the only clear moment of his life, that every word she had said was true.

"That's not her fault," he said.

"No."

"It's not your fault either."

"No."

"Then whose is it?"

And Verna Kelleher said the thing that he carried down the hill three days later, and that I did not get out of her for six weeks, and that she said to me in the same kitchen in the same flat voice, with the pills in front of her, twenty-five years after she said it to him:

"Nobody's. There isn't any. That's what I've been trying to tell you for six years. There's no villain in this house, Wade. If there was a villain you could get over it."

Then she said, "You can't have it. Not a thousand and not a hundred. The three thousand four hundred is for the procedure and for Brenda, and if you want to take it and go, you'll have to take it out of my dresser while I'm asleep, and I'll tell you what will happen then, which is that I'll go to a lawyer in Malone, and they'll sell this place at the auction in the fall, and I'll be on the road in the winter, and you'll have a girl of nineteen in Plattsburgh and a hundred and ninety thousand miles on a truck. Do that if you're going to do it. Don't stand at my table on a Sunday night and ask me to pay for it."

And then she did a thing that he did not expect and that he told me about in a voice I had not heard him use about anything else in twenty-five years.

She said: "I'm the one that asked her to come."

He said nothing.

"I wrote the letter," Verna Kelleher said. "Nobody made me. My aunt's girl in Plattsburgh, and I knew what her father was and I knew she had nothing, and I wrote and I asked her to come and keep my house because I couldn't, and she came, and she kept it, and she sang in it, and she was worth more to this house in four months than I've been worth in six years, and I have known that since about the second week of December, and I want you to be very clear about what I am doing, because I am clear about it. I am sending her back to Plattsburgh because I cannot sit in the room with it. That's the truth and I'm not going to make it prettier than that."

She picked up the pencil and bent over the sheet and did the Sunday column, in the ordinary way, and put a figure in the column for the last week of March, and put a question mark after it, and Wade Kelleher put on his hat and went out into the yard and stood in the cold for a long time looking at the road.

That is the whole of what was said, near enough, out of about fifty minutes, and I have set it down because it is the only place in this entire account where two of the three of them said what they meant, and because I want it on the record that Verna Kelleher, who has been the villain of this county for twenty-five years, was the only person in that house with the courage to say it out loud.