by Ron Hansen
Inside the truck Owen said, “Romance! Young love! The hectic valences of the heart! When I see the way you two bill and coo, I question the bachelor’s life of solitude and higher purpose that my vocation as a vintner has forced me to choose.”
Pierre asked, “Which two?”
Owen said, “You two, of course. But then I think, ‘Oh, boy, Owen! Can’t you just see yourself skimping on the petit verdot because little Oweena needs braces?’”
“I am not understanding . . .”
Owen answered, “You’re in love, pardner! Whole lotta things are gonna be gettin’ by you.” Owen pulled something unidentifiable loose from the underside of the chassis and there was a disconcerting rain of bolts and washers on the garage floor. Owen got out of the engine and happily held the thing up in front of Pierre before going off with it. A hammering could be heard that seemed absurdly energetic.
Pierre walked under the truck engine and just to be doing something idly fiddled with a nut on the oil pan. Immediately the oil pan spurted a leak and he frantically tried to stop it.
Owen yelled over his own banging, “Aunt Opal told me all about it. And don’t think we humble Husker fans aren’t honored you and your inamorata chose Seldom to be hitched in.”
Pierre held both hands to the source. Black oil crawled out between his fingers and eddied over his bandaged wrists. “Hitched?” he asked. “I do not know this word.”
“Conjugal bliss!” Owen called. “The nuptial bond! The hymeneal rites of summer!”
“I am Confucius,” Pierre said.
Owen corrected him. “Confused, my friend.”
“C’est juste. Confus-ed.”
“Well, cold feet’s only natural,” Owen said. He hammered some more. “And we are going to cure it with one of Doctor Owen’s famous Friday-night-infantile-drinking-games-and-foods-galore bachelor parties. Hijinks, jokes, plenty of beer, and sober words of wisdom from some of the least useful guys in a workable radius around here. The whole thing’s gonna go as smooth as cruise control on a Cadillac.”
Pierre took his hands from the oil plug experimentally, and a huge gout of oil drained out over his shirtsleeves before he stuck his thumb up inside the oil pan again. Woefully, he looked to Owen. He heard something ring off and ricochet from the hammering. Owen muttered, “Oh, damn.”
20
And yet, an hour later Owen and Pierre were spiffed up and at the fairgrounds in tuxedos, Pierre’s bandages off, suavely walking past the booths and Weird Animals exhibit just as Mrs. Christiansen and Natalie had on Thursday. Pierre lagged behind to give the Afghan hound a look. Owen pulled him along and walked Pierre inside the food tent. Immediately there was utter silence from the forty tuxedoed but, truth be told, farmerish would-be wine connoisseurs and onlookers at folding tables on which wines, wineglasses, and spittoons were placed.
Owen announced, “Permettez-moi de vous présenter, Monsieur Pierre Smith, négociant extraordinaire.” Hearing silence, he offered as an aside to Pierre, “Tough crowd.”
On a front table were many bottles of homegrown Nebraska wines. Pierre rotated some of them to scrutinize their labels: Owen’s own “Big Red,” but also “Côte du Silo,” “Domaine Diddly-squat,” “Chateau Sorta-Roth-childish,” “Henrietta’s Grand Vino,” and “Property of the Googler Family.” Pierre blanched, but then Owen was escorting him up to the dais and whispering, “We’d like you to kind of walk us through how a wine tasting oughta go, just in case we haven’t been doing it right.”
“Sure.”
Owen sat. Pierre scanned a skeptical crowd as he poured the first wine into his glass and held it up in front of his face. “We first look at the color.”
All stared in a surly way.
“We do not want to see clouds, or sediment, or . . .” He couldn’t think of the word in English.
“Grape skins?” Owen guessed.
Someone in the food tent protested, “Well, hell! I lost the contest already!”
Pierre sought a change of subject. He swirled the wine in his glass as he thought. “We can talk about the methyl alcohol. What we call the legs.”
“Hubba hubba,” Carlo said.
Pierre glanced agitatedly at Owen, but Owen simply offered encouraging thumbs-up, you’re-doing-great gestures.
“We will skip ahead to the bouquet,” Pierre told them, and lifted his glass to his nose to inhale the aroma.
A would-be connoisseur put his nose completely inside the glass, dunking it into the wine. Watching him, Owen got up. “We might need some hands-on teaching here, Pierre.”
Owen and Pierre stepped down to the main floor as Pierre instructed, “And then we taste.”
About half the guys at the folding tables dipped their forefingers into their wine and then slurped it off.
Owen said, “And as far as what Jerome told us last month, I done some checking and that’s totally wrong.”
Pierre demonstrated, “Hold the wine in your mouth like so.”
But Owen jumped the gun, saying, “And then spit it out.”
A host of them spewed and gushed their mouthfuls. Pierre watched in abhorrence as a burly highway worker named Orville bent with his knees wide apart and spit a jet of wine to the floor like it was tobacco juice.
Owen happily slapped Pierre on the back, “See the effect you’re having? We’re already better than last time. And we got forty minutes to go.”
21
The sole customer in the Main Street Café was a four-hundred-pound wedding photographer who, in the on-the-nose way of Nebraska, was nicknamed Biggy. Scanning the sports page for Cornhusker news, he slurped coffee and went through a half-dozen stale doughnuts as if gaining weight were his full-time job.
Iona and Natalie stood behind the pink Formica counter blowing up bright balloons for The Revels. With the worm of one deflated balloon in her mouth, Natalie was trying to tie off another. Shrinking throughout her efforts, it was finally knotted when only the size of her fist.
“This food is lousy!” Biggy shouted and got up from the booth, hardly a smidgen of doughnut left on his plate.
Natalie was mystified as she watched him storm out.
Iona just sighed. “I can’t be worrying about his little world.”
Natalie got his coffee cup, saucer, and doughnut plate and took them into the kitchen. And she was putting them in the dishwasher when Dick stood up from a crouch outside and just appeared there at a screened window beside her.
“Hello,” he said. Embarrassed, he looked down. “I’m standing in the pansies here.”
Alarmed, she leaned forward to see.
“Oh, I’m not squashing anything. I just want to talk to ya. Will ya go for a horse ride with me?”
“But the café is still open . . .”
“You won’t get anybody. Opal handles the after-lunch on Fridays.”
Natalie looked back into the café, which was, indeed, vacant. She smiled and took off her apron as Opal trundled in with her ironing board and a basket of clothes. Natalie looked for Iona to say where she was going, but Iona had spied Dick and disappeared. A lone balloon floated across the floor.
22
Frenchman’s Creek was pelting and gurgling in the background as Owen and Pierre sidestepped among Owen’s trellised grapevines in sunshine in their tuxedos. Owen said, “You see here how I’ve used the classic, double-guyot way of training the vines?”
Pierre gently touched the grape leaves and hefted the grape cluster in his palm like a lovely breast, measuring its weight. “You have very many the grapes.”
“Excuse me?”
“Too manys they hang on one vine. She has only the few nutrients to give.” Abruptly but expertly, Pierre began snagging grape leaves away. “And you are letting the canopy grow too thick. You are keeping the sunlight off the grape clusters.”
“And that’s why they’re so hard and tannic?”
Pierre, agreeing, tore off more leaves. “The shade is bad for. The grape mold he likes the humid and da
rk.”
Owen, joining in the harvesting, asked, “You think we have prospects, though?”
Working ahead, Pierre said, “I don’t know this . . . prospeck?”
“Hope,” Owen said.
Pierre picked a pliant grape and bit into it, shutting his eyes as he tasted the tones and inflections of its juice. He was studious, doctoral, then impressed. “We have hope.” Tearing away more grape leaves and then looming sunflowers, he finally opened up the vineyard enough that he could accidentally view across the water the saddled horses Shep and Ida as they minced their way down to Frenchman’s Creek and drank with equine delicacy. Higher up the hillside, in the loam and shade, Dick Tupper was snapping out with great earnestness a picnic blanket that seemed as red as passion and Pierre’s erstwhile fiancée was looking on with fondness, her loose hair softly rippling like Frenchman’s Creek on a sultry August wind.
23
Imitating prestidigitation, Dick reached deep into his picnic basket and produced two baguettes, any number of cheeses, ripe strawberries and pears, a Château Latour 1992, and Tiffany glassware and plates. “Wanted you to feel right at home,” he said. Including all of nature in his widened arms, he said, “Chez Richard’s.”
Natalie knelt with him on the blanket, sinking into the soft cushion of grass. “J’aime beaucoup les pique-niques.” (I like picnics very much.)
“I have somethin’ I wanted to show ya.” And from the picnic basket he pulled out a zip-locked bag. Inside it was an old journal that he opened as carefully as an Empire butter-fly’s wings before handing it across to her. With a waiter’s screw he twisted out the cork in the Château Latour as he said, “Journal that the Frenchman kept when he was trapping yonder, once upon a time. Had it handed down to me from my great-grandfather. Mrs. Christiansen read it to us in school.”
Natalie read aloud, “Je suis heureux de . . .”
“Afraid you’ve got the advantage of me,” Dick said.
Natalie translated: “‘I am happy to flee an old, tired world, its stomach sour with spite and corruption. In this land I feast on sunshine and wind, wide horizons I cannot reach, skies so full of stars they are on fire. With joy I feel the teeth of ice, the scourging rain, the sun that sears my skin into copper.’”
She was touched. She turned a few pages. While Dick poured wine for her, she translated, “‘My lust was once like weather—fleeting, insistent, little understood. In this wilderness I have density, quiet, and meaning. Here I am never alone. At night the wind tells stories. Nor do I lack for books when I can read the changing plot of the skies.’” She paused. “It’s beautiful.”
Dick surveyed the wide countryside of his residence. “Yes, it is.”
She handed the journal back to Dick but he wouldn’t have it. “I’d like you to keep it,” he said.
Cherishing it against her chest, she said, “Oh, merci! Merci beaucoup!” She hesitated. “Mais non! It is too precious. An heirloom. You have kept it in your family for so many years.”
“Kinda like to keep it there. In the family, I mean.”
She understood his implication. She was perplexed.
With some embarrassment at his forwardness, Dick settled onto his elbow and observed her. Natalie demurely declined her head and considered the open palms that were so passive in her lap, as if they were inked with questions that required immediate attention. A stone was nagging his side and his free hand scoured underneath the picnic blanket to find it and toss it toward Frenchman’s Creek.
They heard a tell-tale whimper from Pierre.
Natalie got up with consternation and saw Pierre’s linebacker build and his wetly see-through Jockey briefs, water swiftly rushing around his ankles, holding his hurt head and weakly smiling in his shame at trying to spy on them. She asked, “Es-tu blessé?” (Are you hurt?)
With sudden energy Pierre tore at some fledgling willow trees near the horses. Heavy dirt clods were attached to the roots. “Weeds everywhere!” he said. “I have been taking down them.”
“High time someone took care a that,” Dick said.
Pierre had no idea what to do with the saplings so he pitched them to the side and hit Owen. They heard a groan from him as he stood from his hiding place, also in his sop-ping underwear and not a pretty sight. Owen penitently smiled and said, “We’re just cleaning up.” And then he foremanned Pierre. “Looks like we’re about finished here, mon frère.”
“C’est vrai,” Pierre said. (It’s true.) And he scowled at his fiancée. “Nous avons fini.” (We are finished.)
Owen and Pierre sloshed back to Owen’s vineyard.
Natalie faced Dick and knew that all that was about to be said—the hurtful I cannot, the healing Wish I could—was at the moment impossible to bring up. “We have to talk,” she said. “But not here.”
“We could meet tonight.”
“Yes?”
“I’ll sneak away from Owen’s party,” Dick said.
Natalie was surprised. “Mrs. Christiansen, she is having a party, too!”
Dick went to get the horses. “You know that bulletin board in the café?”
“‘Good food we charge you for, bad advice you get free’?”
“That’s the one. You put a note there saying where and when.”
“When?”
“Yep.”
“No. When shall I put the note?”
“Oh. I’ll look for it after five.”
Owen seemed to have had second thoughts as he turned on the far bank of Frenchman’s Creek, for he saw Natalie sorrowfully packing up. He yelled, “But you haven’t eaten the food!”
Dick yelled back, “You can have it!”
And like a huge dog, the third-string tackle plunged into the creek and hungrily thrashed across.
24
Late that afternoon in Mrs. Christiansen’s rooming house, Marvyl, Iona, and Natalie were in the yellow kitchen, trying to make ambrosia, but it seemed just a greenish horror with orange, pink, and white things surfacing and submerging as they mixed. Iona went to the sideboard and got out a walnut serving tray and cheese slicer attachment that Marvyl had purchased on the Shopping Channel.
Mrs. Christiansen said, “We don’t have to go overboard on the cheeses, Iona. I’ve never had any complaints with Cracker Barrel.”
Natalie was dismayed but deferential.
Mrs. Christiansen turned. “But this is a party for you, dear. What would you like?”
“Oh, please. You should go to no trouble for me. Anything.”
With annoyance, Iona said, “Well, in that case. Cocktail wieners?”
With matching annoyance, Natalie faced her. “Melon.”
“Pigs in a blanket?”
“Oeufs farcis.”
“Oofs pickled,” Iona said.
She was getting peeved. “Artichokes. Artichauts à la grecque.”
“Yuck. What about those whatchamacallits, Grandma. With peanut butter?”
“No peanut butter,” Natalie said.
“So much for ‘Whatever you want; no trouble.’”
Mrs. Christiansen said, “You don’t have to have anything you don’t like, child. It’s your night.”
“Anguilles à la provençale,” Natalie told Iona.
“Which is?”
“Eels.”
Mrs. Christiansen was holding up at eye level a wooden spoonful of ambrosia. She turned to face Natalie with concern. “Oh my dear. Eels?”
“Why not eels?” Iona screamed. “She’s got everything else she wants!” And then she rushed out of the house to the front yard. She executed four different but equally fierce Tae Bo kicks and punches, then inhaled deeply and hurried over to the Main Street Café.
Opal was ironing behind the pink Formica counter while a trucker from Sidney nursed his coffee. Opened before the trucker was an individual-sized box of Captain Crunch cereal and he was pinging crunchies one-by-one off his water glass with his finger. Carlo was hunched at the far end of the counter and was whining over an imposs
ibly complex origami construction.
“What the hell’s that?” the trucker from Sidney asked.
“Swan,” Carlo said.
“What’s it for?”
“Well, place-card holders, for one.” He took a moment to sit back and get a new perspective on the problem. He surreptitiously eyed a nearby Scotch tape dispenser.
Opal warned him in sing-song, “Cheat-ing.”
Iona snuck into the café through the kitchen screen door, but Opal saw her as she lifted her steam iron. “Iona!” she said. “How’s the shower coming together?”
“We’re having a great old time,” she said. With some uneasiness she added, “I just remembered a . . . thing I wanted to post.”
The trucker went on pinging cereal against his water glass as Iona tacked her note to Pierre on the bulletin board. She waited by it uncertainly for a moment. Carlo’s knees were jiggling as he folded down a wing of the origami and hopefully held it up for Iona’s appraisal.
She gave it the attention it warranted, and asked, “Anybody been in here this afternoon?”
Carlo scrunched a little as he confided, as if she ought not to have brought it up. “Opal’s in the kitchen. . . . Crawfish soup?”
Opal asked, “You looking for someone in particular, honey?”
“No. Just asking.”
The trucker said, “I’m here.”
“Yes, you are,” Opal said. “And I want to thank you for that.”
Iona left.
After a moment, Carlo sauntered over to the board, unfolded the tacked up note, and read it aloud. “Mrs. C’s, midnight. Room number three.”
“Sounds to me like a ron-day-vous,” the trucker from Sidney said.
Opal ironed. “In Marvyl’s house? Hah!”