Free The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

Ingrid Bergman were young.
    That day Jane saw Lou had brushed and braided her hair and wound it in coils on her head. A neat trick, holding a hand mirror. She had dressed in a lace-bodiced nightgown and thoughtfully crossed her arms. Jane tried to close Lou’s eyes. In the end she covered them with scallop shells from the windowsill. Already blowflies walked into Lou’s nostrils. Greenbottle flies slipped under the scallop shells to find her eyes; one bluebottle fly worked a lip’s corner. Where had the flies come from? How did they know? Jane smelled no odor. Lou had been eighty—not enough.
    Jane lowered the bedspread. Her glasses fell on Lou’s neck. She drank two quarts water. At the pump she filled every jug from the house. Where should she do this? For she must wash Lou’s body now. Later the gown and bedding. Pete could haul the messed mattress to the dump.
    The Cape’s nonconformists, including the Maytrees, had consigned their burnt bone knobs, which they imagined as fluffy stove ashes, to a biplane pilot, Loopy Devega, who lived near the airfield. For a fee he would scatter ashes like a sower, over the sea.
    Even Jane Cairo was old, decades hence, when the paper reported that Loopy Devega possessed on his bookshelvessome 170 crematorium seven-pound cans. The first time he tried to scatter ashes (he said), and also the second time, “they all blew back at me.” The newspaper never told what became of the ashes. The Maytrees liked bookshelves. It would all fall into the sea eventually.

 
    W HEN HER HUSBAND RETURNED from the beach walk he took after he told her he was leaving her, he got into their marriage bed as usual. Lou felt his chill. He started to speak. She felt his elbow dip their mattress. She heard his rangy voice turn toward her back in the dark. Was there nowhere else on the planet’s face for him to sleep? On the whole, she did not want to hear it.
    What in the name of God could she have done? They had had a good run. And if love itself, as well as Petie, was the fruit, she could keep loving if she chose, which she at forty-one did not. Petie once told them—he acted it out—that when fishermen gaffed a hooked shark aboard, to save their legs they slit its belly and gave it its own entrails to chew. She would not.
     
    The next morning when Maytree actually left, Lou and Sooner Roy carried the white ironstone bed downstairs for Petie. They set it inside the French doors, so Petie could watch beach, sea, and sky. She pulled a chair beside him. Petie knew his father had left them. She dreaded putting what she saw as Petie’s large-heartedness to test. She placed a hand lightly on his good leg near the ankle, and saw his dark eyes jump.
    One of her speech difficulties was starting. The other was proceeding. Really, she could talk only to Maytree, Cornelius, and the Cairos, dry as they were. They could trace implications to their ends and respond as if she had said those very things aloud. She should say, Your father loves you very much and his leaving is not your fault. And she did repeat those things in the weeks and years ahead. She never brought up Deary at all.
    Their first morning alone she and Petie, red and blue sweaters, watched through the doors the fall of the sea. The horizon crossed each pane at a fractionally different angle. The green sea made the glare in the sky accessible.
    Soon despite cruel medical protocols—Children forget pain, the doctor explained—Petie could swing on crutches like a parakeet.
    That first June after Petie’s leg healed, his friends called him from the rain or frost and he left, and left her arm bones hollow. The Maytrees’ crowd closed the gap Maytree and Deary left as if the two never were. Only Jane Cairo, suddenly twenty-three, registered her entire outrage at moral wrong, scandal, evil (etc., etc., etc.), by staying away and seething in New York all summer. She told her mother she never wanted to see another body on a beach. Jane Cairo was