by Oakley Hall
As he stared out at the orchard he saw Juan, dark and lean in dungarees patched at the seat with lighter blue, come around the corner of the house carrying a shovel and a hoe. He didn’t look toward the porch as he slowly walked down among the rows of trees. Baird took his watch from his pocket; it was one o’clock.
He pushed himself to his feet and thumped down the steps and onto the baked dirt in front of the porch, squinting into the sun. He turned and stared back at the house, angry that his will was not strong enough, for the house he saw was the house that had been his and hers after her mother had died. She had lived here with him. She had grown up here, and he had tried always to do the best thing for her. His eyes were watering, and in them the house shimmered and sparkled.
The house was old too, the paint cracked and scrofulous from the valley sun. The porch covered the entire front and behind it were three narrow windows with the shades half-drawn. On the porch were two rockers and the marble-topped table, the legs of which were scaling with rust. Between two of the windows a batten had come off, leaving a dark vertical scar.
He leaned against the weatherbeaten rail. The sun was too bright, too hot and his eyes would not stop watering. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest.
When he felt stronger he went into the house, and stopped again in the parlor to look around him, his hand resting on the high back of the leather platform rocker. Slanting wedges of light from the windows shivered across the room, across the army blanket that covered the old davenport and across the brown linoleum and the base of the tall floor lamp with the faded satin shade.
Finally he stepped forward and threw open the door of the little room that had been hers. In it were an army cot, a tall dresser, a table and a chair, and on the wall a faded color photograph of Bridal Veil Falls. He slumped down in the chair, one elbow resting on the table, hand braced against his cheek, the other arm lying loosely across his lap. His eyes fell on his dusty boots, and then moved upward to the cot, which was rectangular and flat under its white coverlet, like a cement slab.
He felt his hands clench so tightly they ached. “Why?” he whispered hoarsely. Why had the Lord willed it this way? He thought of the Denton ranch that would now be his; the eighty acres of potatoes, the grazing land, the fancy quarter-horses, the stone house; all of it his, given him as nothing else had ever been given him in his life, without his having to pay for it. But he had paid for it, and paid for it as he had never paid for anything else, paid what a price, taken what a loss. But the loss had been nine years ago, and could he say that what he had thrown away was lost?
He put his hand over his face, remembering another time he had sat here like this—with her suitcases in front of him. But she had been bad, a bad girl, a bad woman, evil, like her mother, abandoned, a———. His mind refused to frame the word.
He was fighting against it, fighting against the remembering, but too strong, too powerful, the remembering rushed up, like hot sour vomit in his head. All of it, all the cruelty of it, came back with a vivid rush that throbbed in his brain and ached in his throat, and the forbidden closet of his memory burst and overflowed.
2
Some part of it, he supposed, must have started the year Alf Landon was defeated. It was a year when the words “parity income” meant that the government paid the farmers money not to plant crops when people were starving. Young men in fresh khaki came around to tell him what to plant, and how to plow, and to explain lengthily about soil conservation. Each month he took the government check he got for doing what they said down to Bakersfield, to cash it and buy supplies.
Juan carried the boxes of canned goods back to the truck while he went into the lingerie store. A girl with lip rouge on her mouth and a dead front tooth came to wait on him, smirking at him across the glass-topped display case. She giggled when he told her what he wanted.
“What size, sir?” she said.
“She’s sixteen. I guess about medium size.”
She reached under the counter and brought out a pink one, holding it up by an end. “Like this? Or we have them in white.”
“That’s all right. How much is it?”
“One fifteen.”
He snapped open his leather purse and took out a dollar, opened the other compartment and counted out the change while she wrapped the parcel for him. Outside he walked quickly toward where he had left his truck. A Greyhound Bus and a big red truck and trailer passed him with a sharp smell of exhaust fumes, and he saw Roger Denton and Mark Schuford come out of the Rancher’s Bar and Grill and cross the sidewalk to Denton’s automobile.
He averted his face so he wouldn’t have to see Denton, but then he heard Denton call his name and he looked up and nodded.
“Can I give you a lift, Baird?” Denton said. Schuford was smiling and holding the door open, an unlit cigarette tilted upward in his mouth.
“My machine’s right here,” he said. “Thanks.” As he hurried on with the package clenched tightly in his armpit he watched the new, shining automobile drive by. His face felt flushed and when he saw Juan lounging in the front seat of his old truck he gestured angrily at him. Juan leaped out with the crank, started the motor and they drove silently out the highway to the ranch.
Juan followed him up from the shed, carrying the boxes of canned goods. They passed the shack with the slanting, tarpapered roof that had been on the land when he had bought it, thirty-five years ago now, where Juan and Mary slept; passed the outhouse covered with the dead morning-glory vine Cora had planted after their marriage, the chicken coop where the old rooster herded his six hens out of the way, the mint bed beside the pump in the shade of the house. Jill scampered out of the shadow, barking and wriggling and looking up at him with eyes that were like clear glass marbles.
“Down, Jill!” he said sternly, and then the back door banged open against its stop and V ran out.
“Did you bring me anything?” she cried. She was wearing levis that were too tight and one of his old white shirts, the sleeves turned up on her brown arms. Her face was plump and clear and she wore her blonde hair in two fat pigtails that danced when she tossed her head and tried to pull the package from under his arm. He stopped to let her take it and Juan stepped around them and went up the back steps into the kitchen.
“What is it, Papa?” V said, but he put his hand on her arm when she started to tear the paper.
“Not here,” he said. He watched her run up the steps. She was growing up; she was shaped like a woman now, and she was almost as tall as he.
In the kitchen Mary had dinner on the stove and Juan was standing on a chair stacking cans in the cupboard. Baird walked past them and into V’s room. She had the package open and the paper had fallen to the floor. She looked up at him and smiled.
“It’s a nice one, Papa. Do you want me to put it on?”
“Yes,” he said. “You’d better start wearing it all the time.”
She unbuttoned the two top buttons of the shirt and stripped it off over her head. Her flesh was white above the sunburn of her arms and below that of her throat, and her breasts were surprisingly full, the nipples tiny and pink. For the first time it embarrassed him to see her like this. It seemed wrong. His tongue thickened in his mouth and he looked away as she slipped her arms into the straps of the brassiere and turned around, holding the two ends in her hand.
“Would you fasten it, please?”
He snapped the ends together, trying not to touch her back with his awkward fingers. He remembered the day four years ago when he had driven her to Manteca so that Cora’s sister, V’s Aunt Elizabeth, could tell her the things she ought to know and the things that would be happening to her soon, and the awful, silent, embarrassment of the trip home again, when he had known what V must be thinking, and she must, in turn, have known that he knew. Now she was looking at herself in the mirror, full front, and then in profile, holding her shoulders back and thrusting her chest out.
“I’m awfully big,” she said.
“
Does it fit all right?”
“Yes,” she said. “It kind of binds a little but I guess it’s all right.”
Her head was cocked to one side, her lips pursed. He cleared his throat and tried to say lightly, “You’re growing up, V.”
She giggled and looked at him shyly, covering her breasts with her hands. “Did it embarrass you to buy it, Papa?”
He shook his head. He felt strangely angry. He wished he knew how to talk to her. He never knew what to say. She put her shirt back on and pushed the tails down into the top of her levis. “Can I go over to see Mr. Denton?” she asked.
“I don’t guess he’s home. I saw him in town just a little ago.”
“He said he’d be home.”
“Did you get all your chores finished?”
“Oh, I finished mending the stockings this morning, and there’s nothing more to do in the kitchen and I won’t be very long. Mr. Denton promised to let me ride Romer.”
“All right,” he said. “Don’t be late for supper, honey.”
“I won’t. Thanks, Papa.” She kissed him on the forehead and ran out. He watched her go, jealously; he watched her through the window as she ran down through the orchard in the sun. It seemed such a short time ago that she had been a little girl, and not much before that a baby, and he and Cora had taken her to Cora’s church in Bakersfield to be baptized. Vassilia Caroline Baird; she had cried when the water touched her. Today he had had to buy her one of those things and it would probably not be long before she married and went away somewhere and he would be more completely alone than after Cora had died.
When September came V had to exchange her levis and work shirt for black skirt, white blouse and black neckerchief, and return to the Priory, where she boarded five days a week. But on the weekends she was often restricted and could not come home; she did not do well in her studies. He missed her desperately during the school year. It was lonely on the ranch without her, but even when she was home for the weekend he did not see much more of her; she was always gone, out with Jill the dog, or over at Roger Denton’s.
Denton had eighty acres of land which he had put into potatoes some years before, and he had prospered raising them, and raising horses. He had a big stone house, a large stable and ring, horses for V to ride, three collie dogs and often a new litter of puppies. Denton was a bachelor almost as old as Baird, but from the few times he had spoken to Denton, Baird knew him to be an educated man. He had money, a new car every year, and Baird realized bitterly that there was nothing on his own little ranch to entertain V, or even that V liked or felt attached to, and there were many things at Denton’s.
3
The next summer when school was out V came home on the Greyhound Bus. Baird picked her up at the highway in the truck. He left her in her room to unpack and went into the kitchen to tell Mary to bring some iced tea out to the front porch, but then, through the kitchen window, he saw V come out on the drive and set off through the orchard toward Denton’s.
He felt sick, knowing she had slipped out the front way to avoid seeing him. He hurried to the porch and called her back, and when she came slowly up the steps he motioned her into a chair. She had changed her clothes. The legs of her levis were rolled up on her ankles. She didn’t speak or even look at him, and hurt and angry, he wondered why.
He said, “Don’t ever go off without telling me, like that.”
She bit her lip. She was sitting in the rocker and she rocked back, bracing the tips of her toes on the floor and looking down at her hands. Mary came out on the porch with two glasses of tea.
“Oh, Mary,” V said, “please could I have some mint in mine?”
Mary nodded. She was huge in a red-and-white-checked Mother Hubbard, and her laceless men’s shoes squeaked softly as she went back into the house.
“How were your grades this time?” Baird asked.
V slumped down in the rocker and hung one leg over the arm. She would not meet his eyes, silently stirring the ice in her glass with a forefinger. When Mary returned with the sprig of mint, she crumpled it and dropped it into her glass, again stirring her finger in the tea and staring down at it. Baird remembered that Cora had always liked mint in her iced tea—and suddenly, in his mind’s eyes, he saw her here. He saw her sitting on the front porch with Mr. Burgess, who had been principal of the Tyler Union Elementary School when she had taught there; he saw Cora and Mr. Burgess sitting on the front porch over iced tea as he and V were sitting now, discussing poetry and books, Mr. Burgess talking in his eastern voice about Shakespeare and Keats and Shelley, with his red mouth like a slash in his long white face, his slender white hands making continual lifting, circling motions; Cora watching him with her head tilted to one side like a bird, her knees and feet held together as she rocked, her dark eyes big and happy with interest. And he saw himself sitting with them, wearing his ignorance and inferiority as Juan wore his dark skin, ashamed to remain with them because he was so completely and irrevocably outside their conversation, restrained from leaving by the suspicion and jealousy that had sickened him.
He shook his head savagely. “V!” he said.
“Yes, Papa?”
“I asked you about your grades. Did you fail Algebra?”
She shook her head without looking up. “D.”
“What else did you get?”
“I got a B in English.” He looked at her steadily and she fidgeted in the chair and finally said, “I got a B in Ancient History, a C in Sacred Studies, and a D in Latin.”
“I didn’t know you were doing so poorly in Latin.”
“I failed the final. We had to conjugate a whole lot of verbs nobody knew and a lot of girls cheated, but I didn’t.” She looked up at him defiantly.
“Take the ice out of your mouth when you talk,” he said. “I’m glad you didn’t cheat but that’s no excuse for getting such a low grade.” He had tried to explain to her that he had spent the money necessary to send her to the Priory instead of to the public high school so that she would have a good education, as her mother had had; so that she might be able to teach school if she ever had to go to work, instead of having to get a job in a packing plant, or becoming a waitress. He watched her spit the ice back into her glass. The rocker squeaked as she leaned forward to place the glass on the floor. She said in a low voice, “I’m sorry I’m such a disappointment to you, Papa.”
“V…” he began, but then he said instead, “You could work harder. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t get better grades if you’d work harder.”
“I do work hard!” He saw that her eyes were wet and hurt. “I guess I’m just stupid,” she said.
“Don’t talk like that, honey. You know you’re not stupid.”
“Well, I guess I am. I guess I’m no good. I don’t like school. Maybe I ought to quit going.”
“You finish school!” he said angrily. “You study harder. There’s no reason why you can’t get better grades.”
She got to her feet and turned away from him. “I’m going over and see Mr. Denton,” she announced.
He looked at her silently, helplessly, as she stood with her back to him, waiting for him to tell her to go, or to send her to her room. He knew he should punish her for this rudeness. But it was her first day home from school and he said, “Don’t be late for supper, honey.” It did not sound the way he had wanted it to, and she walked down the steps without glancing back. He wondered if she were crying.
He sat on the porch for a long time, sipping his iced tea and looking out on the dusty orchard and the rutted dusty road, feeling sorry and helpless and inadequate and, at the same time, angry. He knew she didn’t like the Priory, but he couldn’t let her leave school, and he knew the discipline at the Priory was good for her.
It wasn’t just that the public high school was coeducational; he told himself he was not afraid of that. He wanted her to marry and be happy. But there was a wild bunch at the high school; girls who wore short skirts and tight sweaters and too much lip rouge, ridin
g around in open automobiles with young men who drove too fast, who smoked and probably drank and he didn’t know what else. He had had to run a couple out of his orchard once, youngsters in a convertible coupe who were lolling all over each other. He was pretty sure they had been drinking; when they had driven away the boy had shouted back, calling him an old hick, the girl laughing and leaning against his shoulder and looking back and waving. The youngsters were wild nowadays—it was because of the depression, the paper said—and the Priory was the place for V.
V was late for dinner and he went out on the porch to wait for her. The sun gone behind the coast range, the land was silent and beautiful in the fading day, the alfalfa in the bottom creamy green, streaking and darkening in long finger strips with the warm wind that rustled through the orchard. Tule fog was forming low along the valley floor.
Above the rustling of the trees he heard the sound of hoofs, and then he saw the horse. V was crouched forward on its bare back, her hair streaming out behind her, the copper-colored gelding smoothly running up the slope from the bottom. She pulled to a stop on the drive and, holding the reins in her hand, led the horse up to the porch. The face she raised to Baird was flushed and excited.
“Papa, meet Tony,” she said.
“You’re late for dinner.”
Tony’s small fox ears flicked upright and he stamped a foot. Still smiling, V licked her lips and started to speak, but Baird said, “Supper’s on the table. Now take him home and get back here quick as you can. I don’t want you out after dark.”
She didn’t move.
“V!” he said. “Did you hear me?”
“Tony’s my horse.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mr. Denton gave him to me.” She was smiling again. “Oh, Papa, isn’t he beautiful?” She pressed her face against Tony’s muzzle, her arm encircling his neck. Baird put his hands on the porch rail and leaned forward, looking down into the horse’s short, dark intelligent face. It was the finest quarter-horse he had ever seen, with heavily muscled hindquarters and a deep chest heaving slightly from the run up the hill.