The Fate of Mice (12 page)

Jo herself has, at last, sacrificed everything her father and Beth could have wished: her hopes, her health, her ambition, her idealism, any purely personal desires. She has been ground down to a suffering kernel of patience, that Victorian household staple—as crucial as bread, salt, and oil for the lamps—the woman who gives all and asks for nothing. In the process, she has outlived the era that molded her, has outlived the century itself. Jo has remained at home through the invention of Studebakers and submarines, of light bulbs and airplanes, of motion pictures and federal income tax. Her lifetime has seen the sinking of the
Titanic
, the extinction of the passenger pigeon, and the hideous convulsions of the First World War.

When she was young and strong, all of this would have thrilled her; now it only inspires terror. Jo is obsolete, and she knows it. Selfless Victorian wives are going the way of the passenger pigeon. Friedrich has left her, her boys are scattered to the corners of the earth, and the women of her family who might have cared for her are dead, worn down by work and childbearing. Old and ailing now, Jo throws herself upon the mercy of a world she no longer understands, and repairs to the county poorhouse.

Jo’s hair, meanwhile, has found its way into harems and whorehouses, palaces and parades: it has traveled by elephant through dim, steaming jungles, by camel across the Sahara, by whaleboat across the Atlantic. It has been presented to the queen in Buckingham Palace and crossed the Rockies on a mule; it has been admired in Paris salons and Colorado saloons. It has been mute witness to adulteries, betrayals, murders, political plots, the death of men in duels and women in childbirth. It has seen the world’s greatest cities and smallest villages. Children have pulled on it, lovers have caressed it, heathen healers have cast spells with it, taking it for some holy shaman’s charm.

As we rejoin Jo’s hair, a dog in Windswept, Kansas, carries it away from its owner, a wandering scissor salesman who won it from a California undertaker in a poker game. The dog buries it under a tree. A few days later, a very young Kansas pirate, seeking gold, notices the signs of recent digging and unearths Jo’s hair. Disappointed not to have found more glittering treasure, but as confident as any savage that this relic must have arcane magical powers, he gives it to his mother for her birthday.

“What a strange thing,” she says, holding Jo’s hair gingerly between thumb and forefinger.

“Don’t you like it, Mama?”

“It’s pretty.” she says, eyeing the thick, dirty plait and feeling ashamed of her own sparse locks. “I’d say it’s been knocking about a bit, though. The lady who grew it must’ve been a stunner. I wonder why she cut it off?”

“Maybe she was an imprisoned princess,” says the small pirate hopefully.

His mother grunts. “Don’t get many of those around here, dearie. Those books you read will be rotting your brain. A nun, maybe. Who knows?” She puts Jo’s hair into a drawer, not wishing to hurt her son’s feelings. If only she had some nice hair of her own to cut off. She’s heard that people pay good money for hair.

In the county home, Mother Bhaer lies marooned in a thin white bed, her wrinkled hands plucking at the coverlet in front of her, her wrinkled white head—all its hair lost, long ago, to illness, age, grief—covered by a wrinkled white cap. A thin line of drool descends from one side of her mouth. She has just soiled the sheets.

In her more lucid intervals, she realizes that she has indeed achieved her ambition of becoming like Beth, for here she is, dying, tended by others. She knows now that everyone becomes like Beth, whatever they do in their lives or don’t do. Had she written all the splendid books she ever wanted to write, had she traveled to her heart’s content, still she would have arrived here at last. She has cheated herself for nothing; her self-denial has left her only the small pouch around her neck, holding the twenty-five dollars she has never spent.

For the moment, she has forgotten about the money, forgotten the meaning of the slight, familiar weight on her chest. For long stretches now, she forgets where she is and where she has been, forgets that she is dying, forgets, blessedly, all the things she has lost and the many more she has never had. She lies on her narrow bed, her eyes glazed; sometimes she calls out names—Friedrich, Beth, Marmee—and then, head cocked, fails silent, as if listening for an answer from a beloved voice. The voices that answer are never ones she knows.

And now here comes another voice Jo doesn’t know, someone new to change the bedclothes, to feed Jo gruel and carry the bowl away afterwards, to open the window when the room needs airing and close it again when Jo gets too cold. “Good morning, Mother Bhaer,” the new voice says, too loudly, and fragments of Jo’s past come rushing upon her like pieces of an unwelcome dream.

“Please don’t call me that. Call me Jo.”

The new voice hasn’t heard her. “There now, mum, we’ll have you all comfy in a jiffy,” it says, and lifts Jo to yank the linens off the bed. Jo sees now a beaming, ruddy face, very young, as guileless as a yearling colt’s. When the young woman turns to reach for the clean sheets, Jo sees swinging below her white cap a thick chestnut braid.

“What beautiful hair you have,” Jo says wonderingly. It reminds her of something, but she can’t quite remember what.

The young woman laughs, deftly changing the bed beneath Jo’s prone body. “This thing? This old rat’s tail? Oh, it’s a hairpiece, mum. My aunt in Kansas sent it to me for a lark; her son found it buried under a tree. Just fancy that. I don’t even know why I wear it—the pins stick into my head and it itches something furious. Probably has bugs. It smells queer enough.”

She proceeds to pull out the pins until the offending appendage comes free. She tosses it carelessly onto the clean bed next to Jo, and Jo considers asking her to put the thing somewhere else—if it does have bugs, Jo certainly doesn’t want it there—but instead she reaches out and begins to stroke the braid as she would an animal. Then she lifts it to her cheek, caressing it.

“Don’t it smell queer?” the nurse says. “My aunt said she couldn’t figure out what it smelled like. Nothing you’d call bad, exactly—just strange. Hair
do
pick up smells like nobody’s business, don’t it? What do you think it smells like, mum?”

It smells like sunlight and cinnamon, like ambergris and attar of rose, like battlefields and bedrooms. It smells like musk and milk, fresh ink and old ivory; like pine needles, incense, horsedung, curry, and beer, like old books and new timber. It smells like mustard and meadow grass and moonshine, like savannahs and sourdough and the restless sea.

Jo feels her eyes filling with tears. “I’ll give you twenty-five dollars for this,” she says.

The nurse stares at her. “For
that?
That old thing? Oh now, mum, I’d be robbing you, I couldn’t—”

“Yes, you could.” Jo snaps, already fumbling with the bag around her neck. “Here. Take it. Buy something you want. Buy something beautiful.”

She thrusts the money into the young woman’s hand and sends her away. After all these years, Jo at last knows that there was a reason why her father never spent the twenty-five dollars on himself, and why Jo never spent it on anyone else. A hank of dirty hair has renewed her faith in Providence.

The nurse, guiltily clutching the leather bag, lingers outside the door, her conscience battling with the part of her that has long coveted a grand feathered hat in one of the fancy stores downtown. Surely the old woman must be cracked, to give twenty-five dollars for a filthy, nasty plait of hair like that. And what if she suddenly comes to her senses, accuses the nurse of cheating or robbing her?

The nurse hefts the little bag in her hand: suspiciously light, this little bag. Maybe there’s nothing inside. Maybe the old lady made that up about the twenty-five dollars. I’ll just take a look, the nurse thinks, curious now. She opens the bag and shakes out what’s inside: a few folded, faded, fragile pieces of paper, cracking and crumbling as she touches them. They may have been money once, but they won’t buy anything now.

Poor old thing, the nurse thinks, overcome by pity, poor crazy old woman, her money’s not even any good anymore. I won’t tell her. I’ll let her keep the hair, and I’ll let her think she paid for it. These old people need their pride.

Every good tale needs three of something. Here, then, is our third deathbed scene: Jo, stretched out on her thin white bed with a look of peace after all these weary months. It is the dark hour before dawn, the same hour at which Beth died so many years ago. Someone has combed Jo’s hair out onto the pillow, and the local minister—complacently aware of his virtue in having dragged himself here from a warm bed—is amazed to discover that the wrinkled white cap has hidden, all this time, a rich crop of chestnut hair, thick and shining, hair any girl would be proud to show off in a ballroom.

From somewhere comes a faint smell of horses, of French perfume, of the sea; the minister wrinkles his nose and waves a hand in front of his face. The new nurse must have left this stink in the room, little strumpet under her starched white uniform, so many of the young ones are like that, pretending to be pious when really —

His mind begins to wander into speculations about the lascivious curves beneath the new nurse’s white frock. Fortunately for the state of his soul, the old woman on the bed stirs and suddenly opens her eyes, looking fixedly at something across the room.

“What is it?” demands the minister softly, recalled to his duty. Sometimes these old people, especially the women, have visions of Heaven when they die. That kind of thing has gone out of fashion now, and the minister misses it. He can still remember the days when entire families would crowd around the deathbed, waiting eagerly for a glimpse of the Beyond. He has heard the dying describe the loving face of God, the Shining Ones gathered to welcome them home, blessed Sweet Jesus waiting on the broad banks of that final river. He always respected those visions; with one son dead in a mangled motorcar and another never returned from the battlefields of Europe, he wants more desperately than ever to believe them. “Dear Mother Bhaer, can you tell me what you see?”

She doesn’t answer, but begins to weep: tears of joy, the minister knows, a triumph of faith in the hereafter. He feels joy hovering in the room like so many ministering angels. “Tell me,” he pleads solemnly, his voice taking on the exhortatory fullness it acquires only in the pulpit and at deathbeds. He leans forward and gazes prayerfully upwards, certain that he is about to receive some new assurance of Paradise. “Before you go, dear, dear Mother Bhaer, tell me what you see!”

“All the world,” says Jo March, and smiles at him, and dies.

I was the only one home when the GPS satellites finally came back online. It was already dark outside by then, and it had been snowing all afternoon. I’d been sitting at the kitchen table with my algebra book, trying to concentrate on quadratic equations, and then the handheld beeped and lit up and the transmitter signal started blipping on the screen, and I looked at it and cursed and ran upstairs to double check the signal position against my topo map. And then I cursed some more, and started throwing on warm clothing.

I’d spent five days staring at my handheld, praying that the screen would light up again, please, please, so I’d be able to see where Bobo was. The only time he’d ever stayed away from home overnight, and it was when the satellites were out. Just my luck.

Or maybe David had planned it that way. Bobo had been missing since Monday, the day the satellites went down, and David had probably opened the door for him when I wasn’t looking, like always, and then given him an extra kick, gloating because he knew I wouldn’t be able to follow Bobo’s signal.

I hadn’t been too worried yet, on Monday. Bobo was gone when I got back from school, but I thought he’d come home for dinner, the way he always did. When he didn’t, I went outside and called him and checked in neighbors’ yards. I started to get scared when I couldn’t find him, but Mom said not to worry, Bobo would come back later, and even if he didn’t, he’d probably be okay even if he stayed out overnight.

But he wasn’t back for breakfast on Tuesday, either, and by that night I was frantic, especially since the satellites were still down and I had no idea where Bobo was and I couldn’t find him in any of the places where he usually hung out. Wednesday and Thursday and Friday were hell. I carried the handheld with me everyplace, waiting for it to light up again, hunched over it every second, even at school, while Johnny Schuster and Leon Flanking carried on in the background the way they always did. “Hey, Mike! Hey Michael—you know what we’re doing after school today? We’re driving down to Carson, Mike. Yeah, we’re going down to Carson City, and you know what we’re going to do down there? We’re going to—”

Usually I was pretty good at just ignoring them. I knew I couldn’t let them get to me, because that was what they wanted. They wanted me to fight them and get in trouble, and I couldn’t do that to Mom, not with so much trouble in the family already. I didn’t want her to know what Johnny and Leon were saying; I didn’t want her to have to think about Johnny and Leon at all, or why they were picking on me. Our families used to be friends, but that was a long time ago, before my father died and theirs went to jail. Johnny and Leon think it was all my father’s fault, as if their own dads couldn’t have said no, even if my dad was the one who came up with the idea. So they’re mean to me, because my father isn’t around anymore for them to blame.

It was harder to ignore them the week the satellites were down. Mom’s bosses were checking up on her a lot more, because their handhelds weren’t working either. We got calls at home every night to make sure she was really there, and when she was at work, somebody had to go with her if she even left the building. Just like the old days, before the handhelds. And God only knew what David was up to. I guess he was still going to his warehouse job, driving a fork-lift and moving boxes around, because his boss would have called the probation office if he hadn’t shown up. But he wasn’t coming home when he was supposed to, and every time he did come home, he and Mom had screaming fights, even worse than usual.