The Pugilist's Wife: A Novel

August 27 1987

August 27 1987 Magdalene A band of clouds rolls in overhead like horses thundering but brings with it no rain. It’s summer. And the hot August air wraps itself around the woods and town that is surrounded by them like a damp wool blanket. It hangs between trees and around cars and houses, making everything feel stale and stagnant, bloated with heat.The leaves and grass are dry and turning a sharp yellowbrown. The small crops are beginning to die and the folks in town are losing hope that the rain will come in time to save what is left. It is all over. Everywhere this feeling of death, dryness, loss of hope. It’s been four months since the last rain and the small yard around Magdalene’s house has dried up and is now dusty and brown. The grass is clumped in small dry patches that wilt under the dust and the sun. A breeze occasionally stirs up little twisters of dirt and hay that snake across the yard, turning into clouds of dust which then settle on the ground and the dead dry grass. But what is needed and is being prayed for by everyone is a good rain to soak up this dust, to get into the soil and revive the sick and thirsty earth. 3 Ever since the drought began sometime mid-April,Magdalene has sat alone on her porch thinking: either this is going to be the end or something is going to happen to stop this from being the end, and also waiting for the rain like everyone else, waiting outside on the porch because her house has no air conditioning and some of the windows are stuck shut. Twice now over these weeks she had watched several thick gray clouds float across the sky like rafts moving in a still pool of water, briefly eclipsing the sun, threatening rain. Then they would move on or disappear, like today, the sun coming through the trees again, baking the ground into a cracked brown crust. Something has to happen, Magdalene thinks. Something. 4 Joe Joe Wallace has been walking for two days now through these thick unforgiving woods, the tall narrow trees jutting out from the ground like crooked black fingers. The dead branches on the ground get caught around his ankles and feet as he walks. Yet he persists, slicing his way through the woods like a shiv. He doesnt know how exactly he ended up here, how it is that he is wandering with no food or drink,no real idea of where he is going now.But he knows this: he is in these woods, and he has to end up somewhere or he will die. And he does not want to die. He knows this too, feels it. It’s in his gut. 5 Magdalene Magdalene stretches her arms over her head and looks out at her yard. Except for the narrow clearing where a quartermilelong gravel driveway is cut, leading to the road that goes into town, the yard and her small house are surrounded by woods. There are several footpaths which her husband had cut last fall, just months before he left her, but these paths dont lead anywhere except into more woods and they are all mostly littered with dead branches and dying growth. The cleared land around Magdalene’s house is no more than two hundred feet in diameter and although she owns nearly twenty-two acres, she cannot clear any more of the land on her own, nor does she want to. There is a tractor in the yard, but it is rusted and needs a new set of plugs.The weeds grow up through the tractor’s undercarriage, past the axles, into the engine, where they further dry out and become cracked and split at the ends. At the edge of the clearing is a rusty Chevy truck which Magdalene uses to drive into town for groceries. But she rarely 6 leaves the property now that her husband is gone. There is also a horse that grazes around the yard, but there is nothing for the animal to eat now. Magdalene can see the horse’s ribs, a row of pressured hoops,serried under its dry and...