Eldon reached for her hand and squeezed it under the table. “I’ll clear the snow off the river. Build a bonfire. We can go skating. Maybe you can invite Alice. And Susan, if she’s home.”
Later, when the dishes were cleared away, Caroline’s father went out to the barn to tend to the evening chores and Eldon and Caroline retired to the living room. Caroline plugged in the string of lights on the Christmas tree, switched off the glaring overhead light, and settled next to Eldon on the sofa. A rainbow of light shimmered off the glass ornaments and dangling silver icicles. The tree, while not perfect, looked fine in the dim light.
“I saw Clarice Hubley in the Farmer’s Store yesterday and she’s invited us to a party at their house on New Year’s Eve. I said we would come,” Eldon said, stretching out his legs and propping one up on the coffee table.
“A party? I’m not sure I’m up to it,” Caroline said, annoyed that he hadn’t asked her first. “Who would I know at a party the Hubleys would throw? Everyone is sure to be so much older than me. Married women with children, all chatting to one another. What would I possibly talk to them about?”
Eldon frowned. “You need to make friends with other women beyond the girls you knew in high school. It will be good for you to meet new people.”
“I suppose. I just don’t know if I’ll be in a very festive mood, considering the turn my life has taken in the past few months.”
“All the more reason to celebrate the start of a new year. You have to keep your chin up, look forward to better and brighter things in 1955,” Eldon said, stroking her knee. “Your future could be more than you’d ever hoped for.”
It bothered Caroline when Eldon said things like that — dismissing her feelings, as though attending a cheery gathering and flipping the page on a calendar would diminish the gaping hole her mother’s death had left in her life. “I don’t know, Eldon. My life’s on hold, really. What is there to expect or look forward to?”
“You’re young and more beautiful than you know,” Eldon said, brushing one finger gently up and down her cheek. “Your whole life’s ahead of you.” He slipped one hand in his pocket and just as quickly pulled it out. “But you have one glaring fault that I’ve noticed, if you don’t mind me saying.” He sat up straighter.
“And what is that?” Caroline said sharply. She didn’t need another lesson from Eldon, telling her to buck up, as though he, like her father, knew what was best for her.
“You focus on what you don’t have and forget to notice the good things right in front of you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She disliked when Eldon spoke in riddles, making her try to figure out what he was trying to say, as though she was being tested in some way.
“Oh, hell,” Eldon said. He stood up and reached into his pocket again. “I was going to do this on Christmas Day, but now seems as good a time as any.” He dropped down on one knee and pulled something from his pocket. On the palm of his hand was a small, black velvet box.
“Caroline McPhee,” he said, flipping open the lid, “I can’t give you a life in the city like you wanted, but I can offer you a life where you’ll have everything you need right here in Ross Prairie. I want you to be mine forever. I promise to love you and keep you always, if you’ll have me.”
A droplet of radiant light, the size of a seed pea, was nestled in the box and Caroline gasped at the sight of it. Eldon removed the diamond ring and took her hand. “Will you, Caroline?” he asked, gazing up at her. “Will you be my wife?”
PART TWO
CAROLINE, 1957
MAY
There it is, the crimson stain. Each time, month after month, Caroline is crushed by disappointment at the sight of it. Eldon keeps track of her cycles on a chart in the barn, plotting her courses with the same precision he uses to graph the rainfall and log the births of the calves. He is sure to ask if she’s caught — as cool and dispassionate as if he were asking whether she’d ordered starter for the chicks — and she will have to make another shameful admission. No, she has not.
She married Eldon in April of ’55 after taking a few months to consider his proposal. She couldn’t imagine herself a spinster, caring for her father the rest of her life, and both Eldon and her father convinced her that would be her fate if she didn’t marry well. Besides, there were worse things than being a rich farmer’s wife, she reasoned; it would be a comfortable life, at least. They went to Winnipeg on the train in March to celebrate their engagement and stayed at a fancy city hotel (in separate rooms, of course). She chose a stunning gown from a bridal shop on Portage Avenue and he bought her a pair of Italian leather wedding shoes soft as a baby’s cheek. At a restaurant where he took her to dine, the waiter pulled out her chair and placed a white linen napkin on her lap, the table laid out with as many forks and spoons at her own plate as she used to set for the three of them when her mother was alive. In the first months of their marriage, he was ravenous in his desire for her, pampering her, letting her stay in bed each morning for as long as she wanted.
But after six months, when there was still no sign of a baby, he grew short-tempered and impatient. He tacked up a calendar next to the mirror in the bathroom, marking the days he determined held the best chance of success with an F. For fertility, he told her, an unspoken reminder to both of them he would come to her those nights. Caroline, however, sees Failure screaming at her every time she notices those bold, black F’s. She does everything he asks of her, holding completely still afterward, lying with her legs propped against the headboard, head turned away in humiliation. She swallows the foul tasting herbal remedy he’s procured from Halya Petrenko, mixing it with sweetened tea each morning and then chewing a sprig of mint she grows in a pot on the windowsill. Eldon, she’s noted, does nothing to enhance his own success. She alone bears the burden of her empty womb.
Two weeks ago, she prepared carefully for the prescribed night, brushing her hair until it shone before climbing between the sheets wearing nothing but a dusting of the rose-scented talcum powder he liked between her breasts. He came to her in the moonlight, dropping his trousers on the floor and sliding into bed. He did not take her in his arms or even brush his lips against hers as he used to. Instead, he pressed a cool palm to her breast, cupping and prodding in the same disinterested way Dr. Alden does during an examination, then mounted her and commenced the measured thrusts. Caroline closed her eyes and willed her body to accept the coupling, conjuring in her mind’s eye the precious child she so desperately craved, a baby she would hold to her heart and treasure.
She straightens her dress and fastens the outhouse door. Sport, one ear perpetually cocked, sits outside the door thumping his tail on the worn dirt path. She reaches out to scratch the downy fur under his throat.
“I guess it’s just going to be you and me for a while yet, boy,” she says softly and Sport, with a deep canine understanding in his eyes, nuzzles her shin. Together they walk back to the brick house, through the huge yard intersected by a row of towering spruce trees.
A new barn for the stock and a row of freshly painted granaries are set well back from the house, behind the trees. A series of large perennial flower beds are scattered about the yard closer to the house. Their hired hand, Bert, used to tend to the gardens, but after Eldon and Caroline were married, Elvina suggested Caroline take over their care. Vera came each day to do all the household chores, she reasoned. What was there for Caroline to do? Caroline happily agreed if only for an excuse to get out into the sunshine and away from Elvina’s watchful eye.
The first September, she stuck wooden clothespins into the ground, marking the location of the Maltese cross, the tiger lilies, and the brown-eyed Susans. Their startling colours reminded her of Elvina; the red too garish, the orange too loud. The next spring she dug and chopped and hauled the thick roots away, taking a certain amount of pleasure in the flowers’ demise. In their place, she transplanted delphiniums, lilies, and cranesbills from her mother’s garden and they swept the yard in tur
n with calming hues of violet, pink, and blue. Elvina disapproves, of course, complaining the garden lacks spunk, whatever that means, but, in the garden, at least, Caroline has free rein and is able to tend to the flowers of her choosing.
Eldon’s truck is parked next to the house, the passenger door wide open. He comes out of the house, dressed in a clean blue shirt, neatly pressed with sharp creases in the sleeves the way he likes, and his Sunday shoes. “Why aren’t you dressed? I’m ready to go.”
“It can’t be two o’clock yet. I’ve only just finished washing up the lunch dishes.”
“You won’t go at all if you’re not waiting in the truck by the time I get back from checking the sick calf,” Eldon says, gesturing to the open door. “I have three plough shears that need sharpening at Coyle’s and I want to get there early.”
Caroline hurries into the house and up to her room. Why couldn’t he have told her he wanted to leave early while he was eating his lunch? She looks forward to her trips to town on Saturday afternoons, when most farmers and their families come into town to shop, and to her weekly visits with Alice at King’s Café.
She quickly slips on her sanitary belt and attaches a napkin, pulls on clean underwear and a buttery lemon sundress with an eyelet collar she’s sewn herself. She doesn’t have time to brush her hair so she gathers her blond curls with one hand and fastens a tortoiseshell clip at the nape of her neck. Eldon, especially quick-tempered today, is revving the truck’s engine, a warning he’s about to leave without her, so she races down the stairs. He is already pulling slowly away when she leaps into the truck, reaches for the flapping door, and slams it shut.
The tires spit gravel as Eldon roars down the lane.
Caroline steadies herself as he careens past the mailbox. “How’s the calf doing?”
“Not likely to make it. I should have just given his mother a bullet between the eyes for rejecting him like she did,” Eldon says darkly.
“Well, she is young. It’s her first calf. Maybe she’s not sure what to do.”
Eldon looks at her with disdain, in that superior way he has when he thinks she’s said something stupid. “There are good mothers and poor ones and there’s no amount of beating that can make a mother out of a cow that doesn’t have it in her.”
His comment makes the hairs stand up on the nape of her neck. Last week, she was planting potatoes in the back garden when she heard a commotion coming from the barn. She walked over and stood by the door, watching as Eldon and Bert roped and tied the frightened young cow to a stall. Bert held the bawling calf as Eldon grabbed the cow’s swollen teat and squeezed out a trickle of milk over the calf’s nose. The cow balked and lashed out her left hind leg. Eldon cursed, then grabbed a grain shovel leaning against the stall and struck the cornered beast across the back. The outraged cow bellowed in pain at the sickening thud of steel on hide.
Caroline knows better than to speak to Eldon when he is in one of his black moods so they ride the rest of the way to town in silence, passing by field after water-logged field. The morning’s heavy rain lies pooled in all the low spots. Emerging shoots of yellowed wheat, struggling against rot, search for the sun. Anton Bilyk’s tractor, sunk to the axles, is abandoned near the road.
They pull into town and cross the tracks. Two boxcars sit on the siding by the Pool elevator, waiting for the next train to haul their cargo of wheat to Thunder Bay. Main Street is already packed with parked cars and trucks and there is a long line of teenagers and children standing in front of the Star Theatre, waiting for the afternoon matinee. Caroline asks Eldon to drop her off at the library, where she can browse through the stacks before she buys groceries at Pipers’ Lucky Dollar and tends to her other errands.
“I’ll meet you at our usual time,” Eldon says as Caroline climbs out of the truck.
“I’ll just wait for you at the café. Even if you’re running late, there’s always someone there to talk to.”
He eyes her suspiciously. On their trips home he always wants to know who she’s been visiting with, which women exactly, and everything they’ve talked about. Caroline has come to understand he is not really interested in whatever gossip Alice may have overheard on the telephone lines or anything else that is happening in Ross Prairie. Rather, this is his way of accounting for the time she’s spent when she’s been on her own.
“Five thirty, then,” he says. “Maybe we can stay in town for supper.”
Caroline smiles at him in spite of his bad mood. She hadn’t expected him to treat her to supper, which he does so rarely. In spite of the show he puts on, he is incredibly tight-fisted when it comes to his precious money and it pains him to part with it, especially for a meal he thinks Caroline is entirely capable of cooking.
“Five thirty, it is,” she says, and her heart sings in anticipation of the hours that lie ahead, when she’s free to go where she likes and speak to whomever she pleases.
Alice is already sitting in a booth at King’s when Caroline rushes in, her arms weighed down with packages and books. She found a table in the corner of the library after she checked out her books and, thinking she had some extra time, turned to the first chapter of Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Before she knew it, she was lost in Antonia’s world, and, when she glanced up at the clock, it was already three thirty; she still had to get her shopping done before meeting Alice.
“Geez, Louise, look what the wind blew in!” Alice swings her long, sleek legs under the table as Caroline slides into the red vinyl booth across from her. Alice is wearing a white blouse, unbuttoned provocatively low, a tight black skirt, and more rouge and lipstick than she usually wears. As soon as she took a job as an operator at the telephone office and moved out of her mother’s house, she started dressing like women in movie magazines and launched an active campaign to secure a husband — definitely not a farmer, as she would often point out — although finding anyone else in Ross Prairie quickly began to seem next to impossible. Alice currently has her sights set on Bill Reynolds, the new banker in town, and she was chatting with him when Caroline came in. He is sitting at a table across the aisle from Alice, alone, a table for two.
“Sorry, Alice. I lost track of time.”
“Busy, busy, rush, rush. Every time you come to town, you’re always in a hurry.”
“I don’t have the luxury of living here like you do, able to walk to the Lucky Dollar or the post office whenever I want to,” Caroline says sharply. She is tired and thirsty, having just rushed through her shopping.
“If Eldon would buy you a car or bring you to town more than once a week, you’d have more time for your friends,” Alice says. “And we could have a little crazy fun, like we used to in the old days.” She winks at Caroline as she says this in a voice loud enough for Bill to hear, implying they were party girls in high school, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
“There’s a nice blue Fairlane parked right now at Hubley’s lot, and even though I’ve been dropping him hints, Eldon keeps telling me I don’t need one yet. I’ve pointed out that his mother had her own car when she lived on the farm and was able to come and go as she pleased.”
“Eldon just wants to keep an eye on you. It’s pathetic, the way he makes you ask to be driven wherever you need to go. As though you need his permission. Besides, he’s been promising you a car for two years.”
“He says he’ll buy me a family car,” Caroline says, dropping her eyes, “when the time is right.”
“It’s a bribe, is what that is,” Alice says, dropping her voice. She reaches across the table and touches Caroline’s hand. “How’s that going, by the way?”
Tears spring to Caroline’s eyes and she shakes her head.
“I’m so sorry,” Alice says softly. “Who would have thought getting pregnant could be so difficult?”
“Eldon’s losing patience. And his mother’s even worse. Last week I found another layette, a pink one this time, left on the dining-room table. I’m not sure if she’d been skulking around the house w
hile I was out in the garden or if she’d given it to Eldon to plant somewhere I was sure to find it. As though I need to be reminded of my duty, as she puts it.”
“I thought when the Queen Bee moved out of the house, you’d loosen up. I mean, being on edge with her hovering around all the time wasn’t helping.”
Caroline thought so, too. After their wedding, instead of moving out like she said she would, Elvina stayed on. She found fault with every house that came up for sale in town; too small, too old, she didn’t care for the neighbours. That fall, she finally decided she wanted a new house overlooking the river at the edge of town on Park Street, so Eldon set about hiring someone to build it.
Caroline and Eldon had first settled into Eldon’s old room, across the hall from Elvina. It made Caroline uneasy to have her so close at night, and she couldn’t relax. She imagined Elvina lying there, stiff in her bed, eyes wide, listening to the thumps and creaks of Eldon’s frequent enthusiasm coming from their room. Caroline was so relieved when the new house was ready and Elvina finally moved out. They moved in to her room with the dreary brocade wallpaper and overbearing furniture, and resumed their attempts in Elvina’s old four-poster bed. But even with Elvina out of the house, a baby did not come.
“I don’t want to talk about her,” Caroline says, and orders a soda. “Have you heard from Susan? I haven’t had a letter for weeks. I phoned and left a message with her landlady, but she hasn’t called back.”
“Me neither. Maybe she’s met someone and she’s too caught up in her new romance to give a care about the two of us country bumpkins. She’s likely dating some dreamy city fellow with a house along the river and all kinds of money. Who knows?” Her eyes light up the way they used to in high school.
Caroline marvels at Alice’s wild ideas about romance, how taken in she is by the stories she reads in romance magazines and the fantasies of Hollywood movies. She has no idea what life with one man — the everyday sameness, the effort it requires — is really like. Over time, Eldon has made Caroline’s purpose and place in the marriage perfectly clear. She is expected to be pretty and good-natured, at all times, and pregnant, too, and she is beginning to resent Eldon for it. Each day is a tedious chore, inventing lighthearted conversation to stroke his swollen ego and keep him happy. There are times when she’s tired and miserable and it’s just too much to ask of her at the end of a long, hard day, all that pleasantry and sweetness. Sometimes she just wants to be left alone.
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