The Ox

That is the title to a brilliant yet depressing short story by British writer H.E. Bates. I was born in 1961, the Year of the Ox, according to the Chinese zodiac. It is the first story of his collected "Thirty-One Selected Tales"...written in the 1930's. Yes, it is the same author I raved about from the short story "Fuchsia". In this one there is an understated emotional resonance that just got under my skin. The plot unwinds like a slow moving ox, but it has a power that sucks you in, keeps you reading because his words sparkle the plot like gems. A plot synopsis does not do it justice.
The first two paragraphs...

The Thurlows lived on a small hill. As though it were
not high enough, the house was raised up, as on in-
visible stilts, with a wooden flight of steps to the front
door. Exposed and isolated, the wind striking at it
from all quarters, it seemed to have no part with the
surrounding landscape. Empty ploughed lands, in
winter-time, stretched away on all sides in wet steel
curves.
At half-past seven every morning Mrs. Thurlow
pushed her great rusty bicycle down the hill; at six
every evening she pushed it back. Loaded, always,
with grey bundles of washing, oilcans, sacks, cabbages,
bundles of old newspaper, boughs of wind-blown wood,
and bags of chicken food, the bicycle could never be
ridden. It was a vehicle of necessity. Her relationship
to it was that of a beast to a cart. Slopping along beside
it, flat heavy feet pounding painfully along under mud-
stained skirts, her face and body ugly with lumpy
angles of bone, she was like a beast of burden.

She lives with her husband who was injured at war and has a silver plate in his head. He was a hedge cutter, but often his silver plate would cause such pain as to create a madness, driving him to drink. They had two sons, ages nine and thirteen. They secretly dispised their mother. She saved money for their future...by hiding it under her mattress. The money was everything to her, like a limb of her body, a part of her soul. Then her husband kills a man in a drunken rage and steals her money. He is caught and pays the penalty for his crime. She decides to have her boys stay temporarily with her brother's family and his mother "with shrill eyes and ironed-out mouth who could not hear well." Her boys decide to stay with her brother. She keeps asking her incarcerated husband "where's the money?"He looks at her with blank unknowing eyes.  He does not know. Her brother does and exclaims in a rage "Done with it? What d'ye suppose he done with it? Spent it. Threw it away. Boozed it. What else? You know what he was like. You knew! You had your eyes wide open." And through all of this, losing her husband, her two children, she continues on exactly as she always has for the last fifteen years. After she hears from her boys that they want to stay with her brother, she make the long trek home with her bicycle. The last page is heartbreakingly beautiful...

She went out of the house and began to push the
bicycle slowly home in the darkness. She walked with
head down, lumbering painfully, as though direction
did not matter. Whereas, coming, she had seemed to
be pushing forward into the future, she now felt as if
she were pushing forward into nowhere.
After a mile or so she heard a faint hissing from
the back tyre. She stopped, pressing the tyre with her
hand. 'It's slow,' she thought; 'it'll last me.' She
pushed forward. A little later it seemed to her that the
hissing got worse. She stopped again, and again felt
the tyre with her hand. It was softer now, almost flat.
She unscrewed the pump and put a little air in the
tyre and went on. 'I better stop at the shop,' she
thought, 'and have it done.'
In the village the cycle-shop was already in darkness.
She pushed passed it. As she came to the hill leading up
to the house she lifted her head a little. It seemed to
her suddenly that the house, outlined darkly above the
dark hill, was a long way off. She had for one moment
an impression that she would never reach it.
She struggled up the hill. The mud of the track
seemed to suck at her great boots and hold her down.
The wheels of the bicycle seemed as if they would not
turn, and she could hear the noise of the air dying once
again in the tyre.

Writing like this is why I'm taking a temporary break from writing poetry.
I have so much to learn...