I knew that I would have to die in the end when this began; I knew that it was the price that everyone, most of all my family, would ask of me. I am not afraid now to pay it. I do it willingly. I do it without complaint. I do it gladly. Here is my body: take it and do with it what you will.
There was a time when I trembled at the darkness gathering ahead of me. There was a time when it frightened me to realize that I had passed the last place on the road where I could turn back safely, without anyone knowing. It was like traveling at night on the highway south of town to Cuthbert, when you pass the Lambert farm and head under the arching oaks and the road bends left into the pines, the twilit pines, and suddenly the light is gone, and you are in the deepest, darkest countryside. I looked back and saw the lights from the last houses flashing at me, beckoning me home, calling,
Because you see I know that it was all inevitable now; I had no choice. Everyone has wished this on me. Though you may not have realized it, you all have wished me to die. You have wanted it, every hour, every minute--always. As I was putting on your stockings in the mornings, holding your little kicking legs firm so that I could draw them on right. As I was passing the sugar dish at breakfast, smiling at you, asking if you had slept well. As I glanced up at you through the windows of the front parlor where I was outside cutting flowers, and you two ducked your heads to the side to laugh at some joke. As I was coming back in the evening from helping Miss DuBose write a letter to her daughters, holding my skirt to the side as I ran to get back in time to see to your father's supper. You all wished it. Everyone has wished it. Except one person. Only one.
My mother wished it. I see that now. I laughed too much. I cried too easily. I felt everything too passionately, I had sick headaches, I trembled at the slightest whisper. The faintest apprehension caused my heart to pound. My mother shut me in the bedroom with the camphor handkerchief at my temples and chamomile tea. She said, do not cry, for it will disturb your father, and your sisters. She said, do not laugh, it will make them misbehave. She said, do not stare so, they will think you are a lunatic. She set me to sewing tiny red flowers on the rims of the sofa cushions. She set me to making a hooked rug for Aunt Lillian. The red flowers burned themselves into my eyesight, into my brain, a searing red band slashing across whatever I saw. The red flowers started the terrible throbbing in my head. My mother said, do not move until you have finished that row. Do not set your needle down.
My husband wished it. He said, do not talk so loud and so merrily. He said, do not sleep past dawn. He said, I want you seated across from me each morning at the breakfast table, do not take your coffee on the porch. He said do not play that song at the piano, it is vulgar and coarse. He said, you are thickening around the middle, you will need a girdle soon, you must reduce. Meanwhile his wide belly swelled, his body grew white and thick and flaccid, and he pressed himself upon me at night, and I lay with my teeth clenched and my eyes shut tight so that I would not see, so that I would not scream, so that I would not cough up what was rising in my throat.
He said, you are ill, even though I was not. You are hysterical. And he put me in the white room with the door locked, and the doctors came, and a nurse with a shiny blood-colored mole on her upper lip and a crushed finger. She said it was an iron, an iron fell on it when she was a baby. I was sickened by it, I could not bear for it to touch me. I would not allow her to touch me.
I tried to die but they would not have it that way, the way I wanted it. They wished for me to die slowly, in small fractions. A scrape here. A pinprick there. A small burn on the arm, an incision on my breast. A scab that is peeled open every morning, that is never allowed to heal, that runs puss and blood constantly, secretly, under white clean cloth.
My children wished it. They suffocated me, pushing their hot trembling bodies against me, groping at me with their wet warm sticky hands, touching my cheeks, my abdomen, my hair, my breasts. They disgusted me with their smells, whether sweet or rank, with the spit that came from their mouths, the urine that came from between their legs, their excrement. I saw my face in theirs and turned away in horror. For at one time there was just one of me, just one to do away with, and now there were three: three errors, three blights, three running sores. I had propagated, and now the wrong could never be righted, the slate never wiped clean.
Unless I took it upon myself to do it. I considered doing it. I stood above their beds night after night, listening to their snuffling, the soft hissing of their breathing, and thought of how best to do it, and when. It would have been so easy. I loved them then. I felt the deepest tenderness for them on such nights. Pity and tenderness and love. It was not their fault that they had been born. It was not their fault that I had not put a stop to the horror inside me in time, and that it was now inside them--was them.
I did not do it. As soon as I put my hands to their throats and felt the blood rushing there I found I could not. And so they lived, though they should not have. And took revenge on me for letting them live by wishing me dead. More than wishing. Killing me.
They grew older and apart and distant from me, the eldest especially. They laughed at me, at how I could not pour the coffee straight and drew faces on the edges of the church program and wheeled Miss Dubose out into the country to see the sunflowers and crouched in the garden in an old sunhat. They whirled about me, moving quickly through the rooms, while I stood against the wall watching them, my palms pressed close to the plaster. Their laughter and energy and movement drew the life from me. My face became gray and drawn; two lines descended from my eyes to my jaw, marking the places where my tears travel. A flecking of coffee-colored marks appeared on my hands, the bridge of my cheeks, my forehead, like the spots mold and dampness make on old wallpaper. My husband took to sleeping in another room. No one touched me now--only the faintest fluttering of hands about my shoulders sometimes, a mouth approaching but never quite meeting my cheek.
A boy loved me. That is the miracle. He helped me up from where I had fallen among some Queen Anne's Lace while I was taking old Mrs. Waldrop some sweet fresh butter and a sack of tomatoes. He put his arms around my shoulders, he touched the scraped place on my cheek. He had eyelashes lighter than his skin, and sun-bleached hair so pale it was almost white. His face was smooth, his kiss was like a child's. He always had ovals of dirt under his fingernails, because he was a worker. But I did not mind. Because he touched me as if there were no shame in it. Because he opened my dress and looked upon my body with wonder and without surprise, as if there were nothing wrong with it. Because he sang to me, softly, with his lips pushed up against my ear: The waltz you saved for me. Because he waited for me night after night, even when I could not come. Because he gave me things--an old brass ring, a porcelain dish, a cake of sweet-smelling soap. Maybe they were stolen, that is what some have have said. I do not know or care. They are the only things anyone has given to me of any worth. The only things.
A boy loved me. That was the miracle. But it is also why I must die. For I knew even as he held me in his arms that such bliss as this was not permitted in this life. I knew even as he kissed me that I should have to pay for it, for every kiss and touch and meeting of hands, when it was discovered. I have known since childhood that to love, to truly live, is the worst crime of all, and that one must pay for it with one's life. I have known this, and so I am not afraid or grieved that I must die now.
I knew that I would have to die in the end when this began; I knew that it was the price that everyone, most of all my family, would ask of me. I do it gladly. I do it willingly. It is what you all have wanted.
Most of all you, Lavinia.
Bury me in my white dress, the one torn at the hem, with the lace collar. Put my white brooch at my neck.
Follow the provisions of my will exactly, especially what I have said regarding Essie. You will find it in the top drawer of my vanity, next to my handkerchiefs.
Burn this letter.
Burn all of my letters.
Mother
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