Rust and Roses

The roof leaked on the third night. Mary Ann could hear it—drip, drip, drip—into a bucket she had found behind the shed. The bucket was full by morning. She emptied it into the garden, where the roses were trying to grow through cracked soil and cigarette butts.

She had come to this town with two children and two suitcases that had belonged to a woman who was not her. The suitcases were heavy. They had contained everything she owned when her husband left—no, not left. When he broke her left collarbone and she understood, finally and completely, that understanding would not stop him from doing it again.

The town had a name. She did not care to learn it. It was in Appalachia, which meant the mountains were close and the mines were closed and most of the young people had left for cities where the air did not taste like rust. She found a room above a garage that cost fifty dollars a month and did not ask questions. The landlord was an old man who communicated in grunts and nods. He took her cash and pointed upstairs and went back to his television.

The room had a window that looked at the side of another building. It had a floor that sloped toward the door. It had a radiator that clanked but did not heat. It had everything she needed.

Next door lived a man who worked with iron. She learned this because she heard him hammering in the early morning, before the sun, before the children woke, before the world had a chance to be anything other than what it was. She liked the sound. It was steady. It did not ask anything of her.

Her name was Mary Ann Harper. She had come here under that name, which was not her maiden name and would not be her married name when this was over. She had a job—cleaning houses for people who did not ask where she had come from. She had a routine: wake the children, make breakfast, walk them to the school bus, work until four, come home, cook, bathe the children, read to them, listen to the man next door hammer iron until he stopped.

He came to her door on a Saturday. He stood on her porch with a toolbox and a expression that was almost apologetic.

"Your gutter is hanging," he said. "It is going to fall off in the next rain."

She looked at the gutter. It was hanging by a single nail. He was right.

"Thank you," she said.

He climbed a ladder and fixed it. It took twenty minutes. He came down and stood on the porch and looked at her the way men look at women when they are trying to decide whether to say something and have decided not to.

"I am Jack," he said.

"Mary Ann."

"Coffee?" he asked.

She considered. Coffee was a small thing. It was also a big thing. It meant letting someone into a house that had not had a visitor in four months. It meant talking to a man who was not her husband.

"Yes," she said.

He did not come inside. He stood on the porch while she made coffee, and she handed him a cup through the screen door, and they drank it standing six inches apart, and it was the closest thing to conversation they had had.

The children liked him. They called him Blacksmith Grandpa, which was not accurate—he was not a blacksmith, he was a farrier, which meant he worked with horseshoes and farm equipment, not swords and armour—but they were children and they liked the sound of it. He fixed their toys. He fixed the screen door. He fixed the hinge on the back step that had been squeaking for months.

He did not ask about her bruises. She did not show him any. The bruises had faded by then, but the memory of them had not. She knew how to hide things. It was a skill she had developed out of necessity.

The gossip started with a man named Old Bill. Old Bill was sixty and had nothing to do, which in a town this size was the same as having too much to do. He sat on his porch and watched the street and talked to anyone who would listen.

"Heard she was a murderer," he told the man at the gas station. "Killed her husband. Or tried to. The man is in a wheelchair in Kentucky."

The man at the gas station did not know Mary Ann Harper. He did not know anything about her. But he liked hearing things, and Old Bill had things to hear, so he listened.

The gossip moved like water. It found cracks. It seeped into the school, where the other mothers heard it and passed it on. It seeped into the church, where the deacons heard it and passed it on. It seeped into the grocery store, where the cashier heard it and looked at Mary Ann differently when she came to buy milk and eggs and the cheap ground beef that was on sale.

Mary Ann did not hear it. Or if she did, she did not show it. She continued her routine: wake the children, make breakfast, walk them to the bus, work, come home, cook, bathe, read, listen to the iron.

Jack heard it. He heard it from Old Bill, who came to his shop one afternoon and stood in the doorway and said, "You know your neighbour is a murderer?"

Jack did not respond. He was working on a horseshoe. The horseshoe did not care about gossip.

"I am telling you because I like you," Old Bill said. "You are a good man. Do not let her use you."

Old Bill left. Jack finished the horseshoe. He hung it on the wall. He washed his hands. He went home and sat in his kitchen and thought about Mary Ann and the way she held her coffee cup with both hands, like it was something fragile.

The winter came early. It came hard. The first snow fell on a Wednesday and did not stop for two days. The children were sick—colds, nothing serious, but enough to keep Mary Ann inside and worried and tired.

On the third night of the snow, they came.

They were not a large group. Maybe ten people. They stood on her porch in the snow, wearing coats and hats and expressions that ranged from curious to hostile. Old Bill was there. The cashier from the grocery store was there. Two men she recognized from the gas station. A woman she had once lent a cup of sugar to.

Sheriff Tom stood at the end of the path, arms crossed, not moving closer. He was a good man in the way that small-town sheriffs are good men—meaning he did not cause trouble, but he also did not stop it.

Mary Ann opened the door. She was wearing the same dress she had worn for three days. Her hair was pulled back. Her children were behind her, holding onto her legs.

"Mrs. Harper," Old Bill said. "We need you to leave this town."

She did not respond. She stood in the doorway and looked at them, and they looked at her, and the snow fell between them like a curtain.

"Why?" she asked. Her voice was quiet. It was the quietest voice she had ever used, and it was the loudest thing in the world.

Old Bill shifted his weight. "People are worried. About your... history."

"My history," she said.

"Yes. The husband. The wheelchair. The—"

She closed the door.

They waited. She did not open it. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. The snow fell. The sheriff checked his watch and drove away.

When she opened the door again, she was holding a folder. She handed it to Old Bill.

Inside were three documents: a court record showing that her husband had been convicted of domestic violence on three separate occasions, a medical report showing that she had sustained injuries consistent with his abuse, and a restraining order that he had violated twice.

Old Bill read the first page. He read the second. He handed the folder to the cashier. The cashier read it and looked at Mary Ann and looked away.

"Even so," Old Bill said, but his voice had no force. "She is still a woman. And women like her—women who hurt their husbands—they are bad for this town."

Mary Ann stood in the doorway. The wind moved her hair. Her children held her legs. She looked at the folder in Old Bill's hands, then at his face, and she understood something that had nothing to do with gossip and everything to do with the shape of the world.

"I am leaving," she said.

She closed the door. She packed a bag. She packed the children's bags. She packed the suitcases that had brought her here. She turned off the radiator. She locked the door. She walked to the bus station with two children and three bags and the snow falling behind her like something that did not care whether she made it.

Jack found the bags on her porch the next morning. He found the unlocked door. He found the cold stove and the empty cupboards and the rose bush in the garden, half-dead but still alive, its stems bare and black against the white snow.

He went to his shop. He took a trowel and a bag of soil and a packet of rose seeds from his pocket—seeds he had bought at a garden centre in the spring and never planted—and he knelt in the snow beside the rose bush and dug a hole with his hands and put the seeds in the hole and covered them with soil and snow and stood up and went back to his iron.

The hammer fell. The iron rang. The sound was steady. It did not ask anything of him.