Crossing the kitchen, Henry opened the door to the porch. “What is it, Teddy?”
The screen door creaked and Roland asked, “All right if I come in, Henry?”
Holding the inside door, Henry motioned the other man into the kitchen. Emma had risen. “Give me your coat.” Taking the dogskin coat, she told Roland, “Sit. We’re playing Puhcheesi the Royal Game of India. Raw wind out there. I’ll get you coffee.”
“Don’t go to bother.”
“No bother. It’s on the stove.” Hanging the coat on the back of the cellar door, she fetched a cup of coffee and set it on the table. “Dora?”
“Sleeping,” he told her.
“This last tonic didn’t help?” Emma sat down at her place.
“Didn’t seem to.”
“Mosta them tonics ain’t worth the cost, is my opinion.” She nudged Dennis. “Your roll, son. Roland, would you like to play?”
“I think I’ll watch.”
Dennis rolled the dice and moved the green piece several squares.
Roland had taken the chair next to me, so close I could feel the cold of the March night on him. He warmed his hands on the coffee cup and observed the play. I felt a wrenching empathy for him, for his wife who slept endlessly, for the forlorn dogskin coat, for the shirt that needed mending. For Greece and Egypt.
After the Parcheesi game ended, Emma said, “I’ll get the cards. We’ll all play rummy.”
When six of us played, we used two decks. Emma shuffled each deck separately, then mashed the two together. Jake cut the cards and Emma dealt them out.
As Roland reached for his cards, his knee brushed the side of mine. Despite the interjacency of his cold overalls and long underwear, and of my cotton skirt, petticoat, and wool stockings, a live spark penetrated my leg and flashed upward. I twitched, then glanced around the table to see if anyone had noticed. They were all studying their cards. I gathered mine and rested my hands on the table to steady them. What had just happened? The hot, liquid feeling in my groin was not unpleasant, but my hands were unreliable, weightless and jerky, and my face burned. I wished that I could join Teddy on the back porch.
“Ruby, it’s your turn to draw a card,” Emma said.
An impulse in my belly made me want to touch Roland—and not merely touch him, but grab him tightly, even cause him pain. Instead I drew a card. I was in no condition to tell if the five of spades fit with the rest of my cards, so I tossed it on the discard pile. Dennis snatched it up.
I didn’t win a single hand. “Well, Ruby,” Emma said, “unlucky at cards, lucky in love, isn’t that what they say?”
I helped Roland into his heavy coat as he prepared to leave. Jake had gone out to check on the horses, and Dennis had climbed the ‘the big wooden hill,’ as we called the stairs to the third floor. Emma was slicing roast beef and assembling sandwiches for Roland and Dora. As she was wrapping them, Roland pinned me with his gaze, then grasped my hand, holding it briefly to his chapped lips. I smiled inanely.
When he had left, I washed up the few dishes while Emma and Henry sat at the table, Henry sipping a tot of whiskey, Emma another cup of coffee pale with heavy cream and three teaspoons of sugar. Hanging my apron on the same hook that had held Roland’s coat, I shuddered once more, then turned, shoveling together the cards scattered on the table and putting them to bed in the cabinet in the parlor.
As I reentered the kitchen, Emma and Henry were discussing Roland and Dora, Emma saying, “I worry she’ll end up in St. Peter. He’s losing patience, you can tell. And who’d blame him? He’s tried. She don’t want to get out of bed.”
Dennis had told me about St. Peter, the state hospital for the insane—a woman he knew in St. Bridget had been sent there on account of her anger. I was skeptical, but he said it was true, he knew it for a fact: a man could have his wife put away if she was an angry person. I couldn’t help thinking of the women who might have good reasons to be angry. Loath to believe such an injustice could be true, I questioned Henry but he, too, had heard of it. Could a man have his wife committed if she slept all the time?
Regarding Dora, Henry was more sanguine. “Her folks’d have something to say about any committal.”
Carrying the coffee cup to the sink, Emma replied, “I doubt they’d care.”
I said good night and went upstairs with the tintype of my parents. After returning it to the bedside table, I read a few more pages from Halcyone but could not concentrate. I kissed my hand where Roland had put it to his lips. What was happening to me? I recalled his eyes, that otherworldly blue with the black ring around the irises. They were seductive, mesmerizing, devouring, as if he would swallow me whole.
“Darling Serena,” I said under my breath, “beyond my frosted window, I see a sky full of stars. The sky where they hang is too huge for words to fit. And, Serena, something too huge for words is taking hold of me. I am frightened and happy.”
CHAPTER SIX
In bed the next night, I continued with Halcyone, despite finding her more and more improbable. Once I’d begun a novel, I felt compelled to finish it; after all, the author had gone to a good deal of trouble.
In any event, the plot of Halcyone was thickening. And the time had come for a reader—this reader—to grow concerned about the heroine, even one of off-putting perfection. It is the business of novelists to worry readers, and Halcyone had thrown herself headlong into a love affair, albeit a chaste one. The girl was innocent and vulnerable. And how much did she know about this John Derringham?
When he didn’t fetch her for their planned elopement, I read with suspicion, that John had fallen into a haw-haw (a haw-haw? Well, it is England), broken his ankle, injured his head, and found himself too weak to raise an alarm. Meanwhile, rain poured down in torrents. Would he drown or perish of pneumonia before he was discovered?
The majority of novels I had read involving men and women—and that was surely most of them—were cautionary tales. Ethan Frome, Wuthering Heights, and Great Expectations to name only three. Apparently, there existed great numbers of girls—and boys too—who were foolish enough to blunder into unfortunate or unsavory love affairs.
The hard work of spring planting left little time for cards and board games. When the men were finally done with the day’s work, they had only enough energy to down their suppers before heading to bed.
Weeks passed when I had no glimpse of Roland, though I felt his existence across Cemetery Road, as if a taut wire, a telegraph line, connected us. On my end, electricity coursed through me whenever I thought of him. Around Emma I was careful not to act dreamy or preoccupied. But it was difficult. All I wanted was to sprawl on a parlor chair and imagine myself touching Roland.
Hard work was always at hand, however. Laundry alone was the work of a day and a half, more difficult in cold weather when it all had to be done in the kitchen. On the back porch stood two big wooden tubs, each atop a wheeled stand. These we rolled into the kitchen on wash day. The laundry, in two capacious copper tubs on the stove, soaked clean in hot water and lye soap while we stirred with long wooden paddles.
When Emma determined that things were clean, we transferred the hot, wet fabrics into the first tub, filled with cool rinse water, then through the attached wringer and into the second tub to rinse again. Finally, the laundry was fed through the wringer once more, dropping into a basket on the floor.
I cranked the wringer for Emma while she fed clothes, sheets and household linens into it. “I’m an old hand at this,” she said. “I don’t want you getting your fingers caught in this contraption. It can break ’em.”
“After harvest next September, I’m getting one of those new wash machines I’ve seen in the catalogs,” Emma told me one day, wiping her red hands on her apron. “Still hard work, but not so bad as this.”
Even in deepest winter, sheets, overalls, and dresses were hung on lines in the yard, beyond the apple trees. When we brought them in at the end of the day, the men’s frozen overalls stood stiff and upright. E
mma waltzed around the kitchen holding one like a dance partner and singing, “Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde …”
Moonshine, the Schoonovers’ black horse, pulled the wagon that Henry and the boys drove to town that May afternoon, while Emma and I took the buggy with Sunshine. Unlike poorer farmers in the county, the Schoonovers never used their workhorses for buggy trips. Henry didn’t have many faults, but he was proud of the handsome Moonshine and Sunshine.
We took both conveyances this Saturday as the men again planned to end up at Reagan’s Saloon and Billiards when they’d completed their stops; Emma and I were headed for the grocery store, the pharmacy, and Lundeen’s Dry Goods, to secure Emma a new hat. I wanted to stop at the Water and Power Company, too, where the tall shelves waited for me to return Tess of the d’Urbervilles and choose something new for the coming week. I had nearly exhausted Serena’s collection.
The afternoon was warm and unusually breathless without the constant breeze swaying the cemetery trees and stirring the gravel dust behind us in the road. Emma said, “Feels queer. Wouldn’t be surprised if we’ll see a storm before night.”
Something of that feeling greeted us as we turned onto Main Street. Folks, town and country, were gathered in knots along the wooden sidewalks, heads bent in quiet conversation. Few looked up as we passed.
Alighting in front of Lundeen’s, Emma said, “There’s a sign on the door. ‘Closed.’ Whatever for, on Saturday?” She turned and stopped a woman coming toward us. “What’s happened?”
The woman dabbed her eyes and shook her head. “That big ship, real big ship …” She struggled to recall the name. “Anyways, it went down. Damned Germans,” she said and hurried on.
We crossed the street to the pharmacy, where Emma asked the chemist, “What in heaven’s name?”
Like the woman in front of Lundeen’s, he shook his head. “Lusitania. Kaiser sank it.” He paused. “The young Lundeens, George and Cora, gone like that.” He snapped his fingers unsuccessfully. “This town won’t see their like again.”
I recognized the genuine emotion behind the cliched words—almost the same words I had heard at Serena and Denton’s funeral. I found I was weeping, and I stepped away. I recalled young Mr. Lundeen, handsome and grave, with old eyes and dark hair beginning to gray.
“They never made it off the ship,” the chemist continued. Surely this was conjecture? “Cora, you know, was in a wheelchair.” He was overcome and had to look out the front window while he swallowed tears.
Emma moved off, giving him time to collect himself and blow his nose. At length she returned to the counter. “I only knew the young ones to say hello,” she said, “but his parents, well, they’re royalty.”
The chemist picked up on this. “Royalty. But plainspoken and kind. I just hope this doesn’t kill them. He’s not as young as he used to be.”
Leaving with two big bottles of tonic and a small bottle of iodine, we turned toward the grocery store, where, again, there was much murmuring and shaking of heads.
We carried our purchases to the buggy, and I returned my book to the Water and Power Company, grabbing a copy of Godey’s Lady’s Book. I was suddenly in the mood for something lighter.
After we climbed into the buggy, a silent Emma drove us to the south end of Main Street and the Harvester Arms Hotel, a white clapboard building with a broad front porch where, in summer months, a congregation of wicker rockers faced the street.
“I need a cup of tea and a doughnut,” Emma explained as we entered.
Until we were seated with our repast before us, she said nothing. Then, with a napkin spread across her lap, she measured out phrases, picking and choosing, news of the Lundeen deaths freighting her words.
“A person doesn’t often come across folks like the Lundeens,” she said. “In the pharmacy, I said ‘royalty.’ Maybe that’s not the word I want. They were something more and better than royalty.” She paused. “Well, of course, the senior Lundeens still are, bless their hearts.”
Idly, she broke her doughnut into two pieces and lay the halves back on the plate. “When Henry’s folks first came here, Laurence Lundeen—that’s the father of the one who’s dead now—was a sprout fresh from college and running a young bank he started with family money. From back east somewhere, he was, and newly married, still wet behind the ears and hoping folks wouldn’t notice.” She shook her head and smiled. “He was so determined not to lose the money his family had lent him. Scared to death, Henry’s pa said.”
Now that she’d got started, her tongue was easier. “Henry’s pa needed a loan to buy acreage beyond the homestead, but he had nothing to put up, you know, to secure it, except the homestead. And he’d used that for a loan over in St. Bridget to buy machinery and animals.”
She finally took a bite of doughnut and a sip of tea. “Well, they sat in Lundeen’s office for maybe an hour, Lundeen asking Herman all sorts of questions about himself and the world and where he’d come from. Toward the end, he said, ‘Herman, tell me about your marriage. What do you say to your wife when you go to bed at night? Nothing intimate, just conversation.’
“Herman was struck dumb by the question, wondering what it had to do with a loan. He thought a minute or two, then he said, ‘Well, mostly I say, ‘Ain’t we lucky, old lady? We got each other and we got this place and we got a good boy, besides.”
“And then, Herman told us, Lundeen asked him, ‘How much money do you figure you need?’ And that was that.”
I refilled her cup.
“Lundeen ran his bank on intuition. And his intuition was pretty good. Besides the bank, he owns a lumberyard, a dry goods store, and probably half the town. And nobody begrudges him.”
She scrubbed up her crumbs with a nub of doughnut, and popped it all into her mouth. “One day when I was in the store, I heard Laurence say that you could never count on anything but your own character. Something could rob you of everything in the blink of an eye. ‘Keep your head down and do good,’ he said. That was his motto.”
She was quiet for a long moment. “Now, ‘something’ has taken his son.”
I had never known Emma to have so many words or such a philosophical side to her. Did she feel as clearly as I did how fragile everything was? The Lusitania’s sinking surely reminded me of a beautiful night when a horse went lame and, all at once, everything was gone.
Once more I felt that emptiness of the universe, how—in some sense—we were each of us alone in it, piloting our own little bark, dependent upon our own strength and resources. Maybe not quite adrift. No, we had received wealth. Books, for instance. I owned everything in the books I had read and I could not be robbed of it. No legacy was greater.
And I owned memories. Memories of Serena and Denton: these were surely a golden cargo. And the memory of all kindnesses and kisses. Stowed in the hold.
Henry and Emma were irregular churchgoers. If pressing work kept them from the Methodist church on Sunday, they did not wring their hands but figured that their god, doubtless a farmer himself, understood.
However, the morning after the awful news of the Lusitania, everyone from the Schoonover farm attended church. The Lundeens were Methodists, too, and filling a pew in their honor was a sign of respect.
From the pulpit, the minister explained that he had been with the Lundeens only an hour earlier. In his words, they were “heavy with loss” and looking to the needs of their grandson, thirteen-year-old Larry, now an orphan. “Let us pray for Laurence and Juliet and young Larry,” he admonished, and we did.
Though some warned against planting a garden before the end of May, for fear that a late frost would kill it, Emma and I had started seedlings in the house and were impatient to see them in the ground, so one day in the third week of that month, when the air was soft and the sun strong, we went at it, digging small holes and carrying pails of water.
When we’d troweled the last hole, slipping in a squash seedling, Emma said, “I’ve been meaning to visit the Allens’ and see
what needs doing. Would you mind taking a look?”
Before I could ask, she explained, “You know—are the dirty dishes stacked halfway to the ceiling? Is the kitchen floor a disgrace? When were the sheets last washed? That kind of thing.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. Of course I didn’t mind. I might spy Roland. “But what about Dora’s folks? Don’t they ever help out? What do they do?”
“They run a hardware store in town, mister and missus both. Strict Baptists, dead set against Dora marrying Roland. They had other plans. A lawyer fellow from St. Bridget. But Dora was bound and determined. Now they’ve turned their backs.” Emma scraped the dirt off the trowel she held. “Maybe if the baby had lived … Anyways, we gotta look after Roland. Her, too, if she’ll let us.” She sighed.
In my room, I shed the filthy apron, quickly sponge-bathed, and combed my hair, pulling it back again and tying it with a fresh ribbon. I couldn’t move fast enough. I was trembling and my fingers were clumsy.
Emma was in the kitchen when I came down. “Here’s some of the cake we baked,” she said, setting a plate on the table for the Allens. “Now, you eat before you leave,” she said, “in case there’s nothing in that house.” She handed me a plate with a chicken leg, a mound of sauerkraut, and a slice of cake.
I ran down the long drive, careful not to spill the Allens’ cake. Across the road, all was quiet but for the clucking of hens and the lowing of cattle in the pasture.
At the back stoop, I opened the screen door and called, “Anybody home?” No answer. Stepping into the porch and then the kitchen, I called again, “Anybody home?”
Setting the cake on the table, I glanced around. The kitchen was a fright, dirty dishes everywhere, flies buzzing around them. The floor hadn’t been scrubbed since God was a boy. The stairs were off the parlor. I called up, but received no answer. Was Dora awake and refusing to respond? How could anyone sleep this much or want to? How could anyone look at that kitchen and not want to grab a broom and rag?
Ruby & Roland Page 5