The Final Harvest of Judah Woodbine

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Husbandry: Archaic: The management of household affairs

The redemption of Judah Woodbine began the day he killed his wife.

It’s not too late to call in sick, you know. Judah teased, wistful for the demands of his own career. Despite caring for the yard and several home projects, days without his wife dragged him into the purgatory of solitude known as retirement.

You know I never miss work. Rose lowered herself into the car and opened the window. He waited for her to buckle her seat belt. Leaning into the car, he traded a kiss for the travel mug she always took, stainless steel with a clock circled by rhinestones.

Judah had never missed work either until his damned leg kept him from doing the lifting required by his job. Massive heart attacks or cancer ended careers, not a bum leg. When he could no longer work, his life transformed into something he didn’t recognize. His wife went to work, pursued her career, while he managed the garden, the cooking, the cat box. Everything had changed. His insides burned. His sense of self crumbled. He struggled to put himself back together, a remodel like the one he had given the kitchen. But he knew how to lay tile, rewire electric outlets, hang cabinets, and paint. Rebuilding himself was another matter and dared him to enter places he cared not to revisit. He felt weary and afraid.

Judah took one step into the house to assume the position where, every day, he watched Rose leave. The screen door filtered his vision. The nemesis that was his leg quivered and threatened to give way, something it always did when he didn’t wear his brace and press his one thigh to give it stability. He listed and grabbed the door frame. The door slammed against his back. He was thankful Rose didn’t jump out of the car to comfort him. Early in their relationship she had learned how he hated such acts of kindness. Once he righted himself, he turned and squinted into the glare of headlights. He knew her mouth mimed the words I love you.

Rose flashed the lights.

You flirt. He flipped the garage light on and off in response, then waved, and kept waving, until the dark of morning swallowed the red dots of her tail lights and caused an emptiness to fill him with frigid hunger. He had never trusted anyone as he did Rose. Every day she left for work he felt abandoned and alone. Her absence surrounded him in the same cold blackness he saw when he chopped a hole in the ice to fish, the water the color of pitch. Even in the safety of their precious home, he was a drowning man.

It was so dark in the bedroom Judah couldn’t see Rose’s dresser or the wrought iron coat rack he used for his gym clothes. A few days after buying it, he startled in the middle of the night on his way to the bathroom, poised to wrestle what he saw as a lithe intruder. He had to remind himself it was just furniture and made peace with the metal sentinel in the corner. The gun he stowed at the head of the bed gave him a sense of security. Its presence in the house felt natural, a remnant of his boyhood on the farm.

Judah undressed and crawled back into bed. His mind refused to shut down. He rehashed chores, created a to-do list, and relived fragmented moments of his past. Free-floating anxiety taunted him. He popped the half a Xanax he kept by the side of the bed to quell the storm of aimless thoughts.

After Rose left for work, he shared the bed with her essentials. Her cats nestled against the pooch of his abdomen, kneading and purring. Her body pillow spooned against his back. The bed still felt empty. He clutched the pillow, crooked it in the knee of his left leg. A train wailed like a child frightened by a nightmare, interrupting Judah’s fantasies of wavelets triggered by a red and white bobber plopping in the middle of the lake. The play of the water soothed him.

The settling house sounded as animated and reassuring as the familiar sighs and snorts of his sleeping wife. The train passed. Judah patted the spot abandoned by Rose just an hour ago. Shifting his hips and shoulders, he re-entered the dream her alarm had interrupted. He was fishing. The wake patted the side of the boat. Coupled with its sway in the water, it created an erotic dance set to the music of the wind. The poles and lines vibrated and played their own tune. Along the shore the insects chirped. Steam began to rise from the water. White gloved hands holding strips of burning cloth reached for Judah. He huddled in the center of the boat and held onto the wooden seat. The boat bucked. He heard water slap the wood. A white owl screeched and swooped through the steam.

Wait. That’s no owl. That’s the door chime. If someone entered the house from the garage into the kitchen, the high-pitched trill sounded a warning. Usually the storm door banged against him or Rose, coming in with an arm full of groceries or a lunch box and purse. This time it shushed with the sound of the hydraulic mechanism. Someone eased the door into the frame.

Judah wrestled with the sheets. When he probed the space vacated by his partial plate, his gums felt covered in glue. The hairs on his back rose and pulled his skin tight. Electricity charged down his spine.

Every beat of his heart became a distinct moment in time, defined by the new sensations fear introduced to his body. An invisible vise gripped his testicles. His thighs turned to rock, ready for a yet undetermined action. His eyes strained.

He rolled to his stomach and reached for the headboard with one hand. A corner of the sheet wrapped around his flailing arm. The feeling of restraint thrust a sliver of memory into Judah’s consciousness. He was a boy fighting women crowned by stiff, white-winged hats. They held him down and smothered him with heat and pain. The boy spit and wished them dead and vowed to torment them in their dreams if he died.

With Judah’s next constricted breath, the memory disappeared. His free hand fumbled in the secret compartment of the headboard. He slid the back of his fingers against the wooden bottom of a rectangle no bigger than a shoe box and found something hard and heavy. His hand recognized the cross-hatching of the mahogany grip and tightened around it. His fingers jittered. He struggled to find the trigger. The rush of blood in his head amplified the sound of his wedding ring knocking against the wooden handle. The bedroom door opened. Air fluttered over his face. With daybreak, the blackness of the room turned gray. A silent shadow filled the doorway.

Always strike first. It was a self-taught lesson learned well over the years. Past experience left no room for hesitation. Instinct overpowered reason. In one smooth movement, he swung the gun toward the bedroom door.

He fired.

Light flashed for less than a second, just long enough for Judah to see his wife’s short, spiky hair, the v-neck top of her royal blue uniform. Temporarily blinded from the shot, he heard her hit the floor with a thud, loud and heavy like a bale of hay tossed on the bed of a pick-up. The impact forced air from her lungs in a gasp. He pressed his head against the mattress. His finger had barely moved when the gun went off. With power fueled by panic, he pulled and finally yanked his other arm free of the sheets. He shoved the gun under his pillow. If she were alive, he didn’t want her to see what he had done. He slid onto the floor. With his elbows on the bed, he could have been whispering a prayer. He didn’t have to crawl to find her. One knee bumped damp cloth and the curve of a shoulder.

For Judah, no words accurately described the smell of gunfire. It was unique, unsettling. Acidic and bitter and burnt. Another smell crept up Judah’s nose, a blend of copper pennies and toothpaste. Leaning against the bed, he sat with his legs straight out. He pulled her across his thighs and tried to rest her head on him. Rose’s arms flopped apart, opening as if to embrace him, but they never encircled his neck, never pulled his face to hers. She never let her lips melt into his as they had every day of their life together. Warm gobbets of her dotted his thighs.

He retched. Oh, God. Why this woman?

Judah struggled to get out from under her. A move he’d executed countless times when they made love, it now seemed an impossible task. He knew what Rose called it at work: dead weight. He shimmied and scooted and placed her on the carpet next to him.

On hands and knees, Judah leaned over Rose. All that was private hung in the air. He yelled her name. He looked at her eyes and prayed for them to connect with anything in the room. Surely she saw her Georgia O’Keefe on the wall, or the coyote jaw decorated with the turquoise disc and feathers. Look at them. Don’t be so stubborn. Please.

Rose. Tell me what to do. He remembered her stories from work, the hours he had listened to her obsess over what she had done right, what she had done wrong. "You said you never stopped trying, especially with the young ones. You’re my young one. Judah flapped his hands as if he had touched something hot. I’ve got to do this right." It had been years since she had taught him CPR.

He turned his head and placed his ear between the small mounds of her breasts. Please take a breath. God, please let her live. He waited, counted seconds, what seemed like a day of seconds. No movement.

His rough, broad fingers explored the length of her neck. When he felt her skin under his fingertips, he stopped pressing and waited for the thrum of the faintest pulse. I remember you told me not to press too hard. He didn’t want to stop the passage of even one red cell. No pulse.

Judah placed a palm on Rose’s chest. A St. Camillus medal shared a gold chain with her grandmother’s wedding ring. He lifted the medal and kissed it. She had taught him about the patron saint of the sick and the caregivers. If only that saint hid somewhere in their room.

I am so sorry if this hurts. He started CPR. His mouth engaged lips pale, tepid, no longer supple. They shocked him when they didn’t search to find a perfect fit to match his. Each breath he tried to deliver encountered resistance. An ominous rattle rushed back at him.

Without letting go of her hand, Judah stretched and grabbed the phone from the table by the bed. He paused, his fingers hovering over the keys. Out of habit, he dialed her number at work. The illuminated ten digit number made him cry out. He hung up before anyone answered, then dialed 911.

What’s your emergency? A monotone voice asked.

You’ve got to come. I’ve shot my wife. Then strangled words slipped out of his mouth in a whisper: I think she’s dead.

Cold and naked, Judah sat holding the cruel imitation of his wife’s hand. With its waxy, coolness, he could almost deny it was hers. He rocked. His moans echoed through the house. Morning light allowed him to see a spreading stain. When it encroached on his leg it felt warm. It seemed he was pulling the life out of her.

He stroked Rose’s fingertips and felt the edges of the nails, jagged from her nervous biting. How many times had he pulled her hands from her mouth? A sob erupted. Rose I should never have let my guard down. I stopped counting how many days in a row I’d been happy. I shouldn’t have, but I thought it was safe. I thought we’d go on and on. Please forgive me. I took us for granted. He inhaled through his nose and exhaled through pursed lips, trying to restrain his tears. The round cap of a Sharpie she used at work peeked over the top of her pocket. When we were first together, I dreaded the day you’d pull away from me and not want me anymore. But you fooled me. You loved me no matter what. In spite of my bald head. In spite of the years between us. In spite of my damned brace. You loved me anyway.

When he reached to rearrange her hair, his hand trembled and resisted. I got up every morning, brewed the coffee, sent you off and waited for you to come home. When I heard the garage door going up, I knew why I found joy in every day, pride in every task. Oh Rose. What am I going to do now?

His hand passed over her forehead. In the hospital where they had met, she had used the same gesture to comfort his son. At her hairline, Judah’s pinkie dipped into a hole the size of a nickel. It touched something warm and wet. When his fingers raked through her hair, just like she did after a shower, they stopped at the jagged edge of a crater where the defiant tuft of her cowlick used to be.

Judah gagged. It was his time to pull away from Rose.

From a distant place, he heard the door frame splinter. Feet stomped through the living room.

The police entered with guns drawn, pointed to the floor. Paramedics followed with bags of gear. Everyone moved with practiced efficiency. Bags unzipped. Equipment unlatched and snapped open. Voices droned familiar words. Judah’s shock prevented him from understanding. Hands pulled him up and wrapped a sheet around his nudity. A stranger guided him out of his own bedroom. He looked neither backward nor forward. Each step was a surprise. So many people intruding in his house. So much noise.

Judah refused to look up. Such a gesture implied hope. He had none. He watched smudged, black shoes mat the carpet into waffled outlines of an army of soles. Moist maroon dappled one shoe, dried brownish red another. The steps pressed an arc around his bare feet. His right foot, a typical old man’s foot, was pale and marked by a network of blue. His toes on that foot were well manicured.

His left foot did not belong with the other. Smaller, narrower, with no visible veins, the great toe stuck out, round as a plum, with a thick, jagged nail that dug into his flesh. From time to time, the toe bled for no reason. It reminded him of the many times in his life he had never quite been ordinary. Until he met Rose, he had interpreted the bleeding as a reminder to stay on guard.

In the blank screen of the television, Judah saw his image as a ghost of grayish green. Who was this Judah Woodbine? This Judah’s eyes sagged with more than the weight of his age. The outline of his body, his colorless skin dissolved into the screen. It would be so much easier if he could just disappear. Judah sensed that once he looked into the faces of those now around him, it would make whatever had happened real and irreversible.

I won’t look up. I will not look up.

The detective was middle-aged bland. His knees crackled when he squatted to speak to Judah. Wearing a cologne of coffee, gun oil and sweat, the man sought to make eye contact.

Mr. Woodbine, sir. Can you tell me what happened here?

Judah hid in denial and silence. He remembered things about the day. Daily habits made it like any other. When Rose came out of the bedroom, he had been wallowing in the discontent of facing another day alone. Each time he saw her was like seeing her for the first time. She energized the room with her towel-fluffed, uncombed hair and the rush to pack her lunch. Just watching her get ready for work lifted him from the morass of his daily circumstance. He would shift his focus from her departure to the certainty of her return. With her he felt whole.

Under the quilt, Judah clutched an object in his fist.

What do you have there, sir? The detective asked. An officer advanced with a hand placed on the butt of his gun. The detective motioned him to stay back.

Judah didn’t want to reveal what he had removed from Rose’s nightstand. It was an obsidian queen’s piece from their chess set mounted on a golden oak base. He held it so tight the point of the crown jabbed the fleshy softness between his fingers. He had given Rose the trophy as an apology after he had swept the board and scattered the chessmen in frustration. She had beaten him at a game he had taught her. The plaque read: For she who can always move anywhere. I’ll always love my Queen.

His open hand worked its way out from under the quilt. Judah dropped the trophy into the detective’s hand. It shouldn’t have happened. I taught her to always protect the queen. He couldn’t concentrate. Chaos scrambled his thoughts. He was talking about chess when his Rose was dead. She was supposed to be at work, Judah’s voice trailed off. I’d asked her to call in sick. His lips hardly moved.

The detective said nothing, the silence more provocative than any question.

I heard the train. Then someone came in through the back door. I thought someone had gotten into the house. Judah looked at the detective, saw the telling lump of a poorly-healed broken nose. She was supposed to be at work. Why did she come home? Frustration and sorrow amplified his words.

The next thing I remember is the smell.

What smell, sir?

Gunfire.

The detective’s face changed from slack to animate. Questions became pointed and unsettling. Judah felt pressure from a source other than grief which added to his shock and confusion. Cameras flashed. Areas were marked and measured with precision. White tape outlined a caricature of his wife in the place where she lay on the floor.

The detective stood up, rubbed his knees, and sat on the coffee table to face Judah. Do you have a license for the gun?

The smell of the gunfire lingered in Judah’s nose. He replayed the flash again and again. I’m sorry. What?

Do you have a license for your gun?

No. He had grown up with guns. They were as commonplace as fishing rods in farm country. I was fishing back home. Stopped to pee by the side of the road and there it was in the grass. I picked it up. I’ve had it for twenty years. Haven’t fired it for almost as many. Judah shook his head. She should have been at work.

Judah didn’t see the paramedics pass by with the rickety gurney. From the bedroom, he heard it snap to a manageable height. The click of its joints sounded like his leg brace. The paramedics pushed Rose through the house in a black body bag with an oval zipper. Judah leaned forward and pushed off the sofa. When he reached the bag and pinched the zipper tab between his thumb and forefinger, an anonymous hand tapped his and pushed it away.

You don’t want to do that, sir.

In Judah’s mind, the dips and curves of the bag created an imagined horror of what changes were already beginning to take place with Rose. Her face slackened and became featureless. Her flesh melted away; her skin pooled beneath her body. Judah knew in a short time she would no longer be recognizable.

He sat down and pressed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger to obscure the vision. No amount of pressure blinded him from what he saw.

The gurney clattered over the threshold. Sounds ebbed as people and equipment exited the house.

Are they going to leave me alone?

You’ll need to come with us. Is there anyone you can call?

What? Why did he have to go? Judah saw the detective’s mouth form words that didn’t register. Now that Rose’s body was gone, the silence in the house roared. It pulsed through every room. He wanted to stay in the only place he felt safe. But he had to get away, to go somewhere, anywhere, to escape the soul piercing silence.

Judah inhaled in search of a last remnant of her. She never wore perfume. When she pinched the rosemary bush at the end of the driveway and rubbed the oil into a small patch of skin, she created her own scent. She had done that the first time they went out. The smell lingered and lasted the entire night. Once they were together, the essence of rosemary haunted the house, a friendly spirit that celebrated their connection. Judah tipped his nose up, to the left, to the right, and sniffed. He smelled strangers’ clothes stale from long hours of work, the cat box, his own fear. But no rosemary. He discovered the odor of emptiness. Where are you, Rose?

Unsure what to do next, Judah stood and wandered through the house. A swarthy rookie, whose thin, pointed face and dark stubble hinted at his potential for menace, shadowed him. Judah touched her things, the parts of her that managed to escape the black bag. He explored the texture of the ornate pewter picture frame over the fireplace, the cost of which she never shared. He played with the knob of the accent light in her curio cabinet. Every holiday, he had added to her collection of ceramic nurse figurines. The bobble headed nurse he purchased from an obscure website had surprised her with its uniqueness. He tapped its head. When it bobbed, it seemed macabre and mocking with its fixed, glazed stare.

Lost in their house, Judah drifted until the rush of adrenalin turned to weighty fatigue.

He collapsed on the sofa and pulled the sheet tight. His teeth clicked against each other and his body shivered. Someone threw a quilt over his shoulders. He cowered and felt colder than he ever had in his life.

As a boy, he and his brother had huddled in a portable shack, built for ice fishing with nothing to warm them but a kerosene heater. In his own living room he was colder than that, but the cold started from the inside, took root, and bloomed. If something warm touched him he thought he might shatter. Fear distorted his senses. His buttocks felt every thread in the nubby weave of the sofa. Voices and words ran together in an annoying dissonance.

Where are your clothes, sir? We need you to get dressed and come with us.

I’ll get them. Judah leaned forward and tried to stand.

Using a touch incongruent with his stature and job, the detective held Judah down. We can’t let you into the room until we’re through processing it.

Judah brushed the hand from his shoulder. You can get my clothes, but you can’t touch my brace. You can watch everything I do. A stranger picking up the brace would violate him, create a false intimacy. It would reveal more than seeing him naked, more than examining his dead wife’s body. Oh God. What next?

He pushed off the sofa and walked to the bedroom. A cross of yellow tape emblazoned with black letters blocked the door. A blue tarp covered the white tape marking the spot where Rose had collapsed. A sea of plastic stood between Judah and their bed. He made his side every day with the sheet tucked under the pillow and the quilt on top. Her side was always a twist of sheet, comforter, and an extra quilt. When she first went to bed, she was always cold. She burrowed under the layers and fell asleep, then threw everything onto his side in the middle of the night. Hot flashes, she had explained.

Judah closed his eyes. God. How the hell had this happened? There were no tears to slide down his face. He touched the corner of the tarp with one toe. Would he ever be able to enter this house again?