The Promise My Wife Made Me Keep

Ursula gripped my hand on the last night of her life hard enough to leave four small bruises across my knuckles, the kind I did not notice until the next morning when there was nothing left to do but notice things like that. It was a little before eleven at night, the third week of March, and the hospital room smelled like rubbing alcohol and the coffee I had stopped drinking somewhere around dinner.

“Promise me something, Monty.” My name is Ulmont Ordway, but Ursula had shortened it to Monty on our second date in 1979 and never once called me anything else in forty four years of marriage. By that hospital bed, she was the only person alive who still used it.

“Anything,” I said, because that is what you say, and because I meant it the way you mean things at eleven o’clock on the last night.

“Never go out to the land at Pilot Grove.” Her voice had gone thin with the morphine, but her grip on my hand had not. “Whatever you hear about it after I’m gone. Whatever anybody tells you. You stay away from those sixty acres and you let it be.”

I asked her why, the way I had asked a hundred times over the years whenever the subject of that land came up, which was never often and never for long. She always waved it off the same way. A bad investment from before we were married, she’d say. Wasted money, not worth the drive out to see it, let alone own it.

This time she didn’t wave it off. This time she just closed her eyes and said, “Some things I kept from you because they were mine to carry, not yours. Let me carry this one all the way.” Then she asked the nurse for more water, and by morning she couldn’t speak above a whisper, and by the following Tuesday she was gone.