It was true. The big ugly house sat almost in the center of the wide farm, the four hundred acres shaped vaguely like an open hand. It sat among smooth hills, so that if they went very far in any direction they would have to climb.
“Your wish is my command,” she said.
“Well…” He gave her a look. Lightness and irony more or less sweet, that was Sheila. He shrugged a shoulder and started toward their car, the old blue Buick parked in the sloping driveway behind the house.
“But let’s do walk,” she said. “It’s a warm lovely day, and walking won’t take so terribly much time. It’ll be soon enough you’re back to your nasty old books and note cards. Surely we’re not here just for you to work.”
“Still, that’s mostly why we’re here. At least, I hope it is.” But he gave over anyway, and turning suddenly to her took her hand.
As quickly, involuntarily, she almost drew away. His hand on hers was dry and cool, actually cold, and startling in the warm sunlight. “You’ll have to get used to walking,” she said. “Now that you’re in the country, you’ll have to do all sorts of rustic things. You’ll have to drink fresh milk and rob the honeybees and eat wild flowers. You’re going to become a happy child of nature. I’m sure you’ll make a great success of it.”
“Oh, that’s me. A happy child of nature.”
In a hundred yards or so the road had climbed, cutting along the side of the hill. A slow dark stream ran in the narrow bottom field below; serpentine, sluggish, it reflected no light through the tall weeds and bushes that crowded to its edges. Sheila pointed toward it. “Maybe we could spread our blanket by the creek down there,” she said. “It looks so nice and cool.”
“Do you really want to go crawling through those weeds? I bet the whole field is full of snakes and spiders. And the ground down there’ll be wet, so close to the stream.”
“Weeds won’t hurt you,” she said. She patted the smooth leg of her pink cotton slacks. “Come on, chicken heart, it’ll be very nice, bet you a pretty.” She tugged at his hand, drew him to the side of the road.
“Hold on a minute.” He shifted the basket to his other hand, and his body tilted perceptibly with the weight. “What in the world did you put in here, anyway? Heavy as lead.”
“All kinds of surprises,” she said. “Lead hamburgers, lead rolls, lead mustard…”
They got through the field without much difficulty and she was right, here by the stream it was cool. They found a circle of long cool grass, almost free of weeds, and shadowed by a stand of scrubby willow bushes. Sheila wafted a blue tablecloth over the ground and crawled over it on hands and knees to smooth it out. Then she stood and fingered her fine blond hair back from her temples. “Oh, this is lovely.” She looked at him, an anxious inquiry. “Isn’t it lovely?” The stream lapped intermittently at the banks, the dark water moved slow and dreamy through the shadows; now and again it splashed up a wink of reflected sunlight. Her face gleamed momentarily in a pure reflection of the sun. “We ought to take all our meals down here.”
“Not me,” he said. “I m not getting out of bed and wallow through weeds and mud for breakfast.”
“No, not breakfast. You don’t have to be silly about it.” She laughed. She began taking paper plates from the basket: held one up and flourished it ruefully. “These really ought to be very fine china,” she said. “I’ve decided that we’re celebrating.”
“If those had been china, I’d never have got here with the basket.”
She produced a large brown paper bag and drew a pretty baked hen from it. “Volla!” And there was wine too, a California white wine in a green bottle with a red foil wrapping over the top. And a mixed salad tied up in a little plastic bag. “The plates are just for the salad, anyway. You’ll have to be a child of nature and eat the chicken with your own crude hands. And look: I bought some ready-made dressing.” She held up a small bottle and began shaking it furiously.
He had been staring at her, awestruck. “Where did you get all this stuff? The chicken and everything.…What is it we’re supposed to be celebrating?”
“There’s a little old restaurant in the town. They were just delighted to sell me a nice baked chicken. See—while you were mooning around the house all morning I kept myself busy, planning and preparing these nice things for us. Everything just to make you happy.”
He sighed. “And what is it we’re celebrating?”
“Our vacation.…Or just being here in this good cool spot by the water. Or anything. Why not?”
“Mmnh.” Descending tone of regret. He felt that he had so much yet to do that even to be happy for the opportunity would be in some way to harm it, to jinx the chance for finishing.
“Anything, we’re celebrating anything you like. Remnant Pagan Forces in American Puritanism.”
“A bit prematurely, perhaps.” He cut his words short, isolated each of them with brief pauses. He couldn’t help it.
She pouted. “Now please don’t be a grouch. If you begin now, you’ll just be a grouch all summer and neither of us will have a good time, and you won’t get any more work done than if you’d been cheerful.”
“Sorry,” he said. But still the word was clipped.
“Look now…” She leaned carefully from her kneeling position, carefully across the spread tablecloth and pulled his ear lobe. “Eat. Drink. Enjoy. Relax. Nothing bad has happened, and nothing bad is going to happen.…And look what I got for you for after lunch.” She fumbled in the basket for a moment and took out a fat masculine cigar. “If you don’t like it, I’ll strangle you,” she said. “It was the most expensive one they had.”
Finally he relented, or at least his body did; he threw himself back on the grass and laughed. Sunlight spotted his chest and face, spots like shiny yellow eyes.
She was laughing too, a liquid twittering, but suddenly stopped. “I hope you’re not laughing at me,” she said. She blinked her eyes wide.
He only laughed the harder, laughing at both of them, laughing most of all at the hard core of stodginess in himself that he was afraid of. Unresting shadows poured down his throat, leaf shadows twinkled on his face.
“Oh, you are.” She was going to become angry. She looked about for something to throw at his convulsed thin chest.
“I’m not laughing at you.” He lifted his hand, smiled at her. “No, really, I’m not.…But you’re too much for me. You’re simply too much.”
“Yes, that’s right. You’re a happy child of nature. Simple. Pure. You can’t understand my sophisticated complexity.” She dumped salad from the moist plastic bag onto a paper plate. “Here, nature boy, eat.…You’re an animal.”
“In a lot of ways, that’s true,” he said, his voice taking an unconsciously serious edge. “I am simple, and you are pretty sophisticated. Anyway, you understand both of us better than I understand myself.”
She took the wine bottle, peeled away the foil, unscrewed the top and poured. “Here,” she said. “Drink this down and shut up. You’ll give me a headache with all that psychological talk.”
He hushed and they ate in silence. He kept looking at her, at her cool blond hair so spattered with light and shadow, at the way she moved her hands so freely, at the whiteness of her throat. So pretty she was, small and womanly, clear-eyed; it was a catch in his breathing. Her emotions were so mobile—she felt and responded to the slightest movement of things about her immediately and without hindrance —that he often forgot the chromium-bright hard mind which shone in the center. She was, after all, possessed of a nice intellect, superior perhaps to his own. In the core of his throat he breathed a wistful sigh, still looking. She colored slightly under his fixed gaze; she had misinterpreted it. Ho-ho-ho: so that was the drift of the breeze, was it? Her careful picnic was really a praeludium to the unaccustomed joy of making love in the open air. “In sight of God and everybody.” He leaned back and got out his handkerchief and wiped at his fingers all runny with the juices of the bird. He smiled
a slight dark smile.
She moved again, looked away; grew fretful under his stare. “Well, what is it then?” she said. “Do you see something you haven’t seen before?”
He grinned, picked up the waxed paper cup and held it toward her, “Let’s have another drink.”
She mimed drawing away. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you’ve had enough already. Maybe too much. You’ve already got staring drunk.” She poured the cup full.
“That’s the way, baby,” he said. “Lay it on me.”
She put down the bottle and flung a chicken bone at him. He sprang at her—the motion exaggerated, sudden—caught her shoulder and tumbled her over. She almost wiggled loose, but he caught her forearm and held her. She tugged as hard as she could; her face was hot and scarlet. They rolled wildly over and over in the grasses and tablecloth. Finally she got his shoulder under a pink-clad knee and held him pinned fast on one side. Her voice took a hoarse false edge. “You idiot.”
“Who, me?” He lay still. He touched her breast gently with his forefinger; held it cupped. “Yes, yes indeed,” he said.
“You idiot,” she said. The hard edge had melted off her voice.
He felt soft and lazy, murmuring, “Yes, yes indeed.”
Her hair had come undone; a twig and a few blades of grass were caught in the bright net of it. She loomed above him, as eminent as if she leaned out of the sky. She seemed yielding and fiercely happy. Caught in the top limbs of the undergrowth behind her was a red round flicker he had first took to be a balloon. It bobbed, disappeared.
“Stop a minute,” he said. He clasped the back of her hand, squeezed it firmly. “Wait…Let me up.”
She got off and sat, clasping her knees with her forearms. He rose and the little fat man stepped out of the alder thicket. His face was like a balloon, red as catsup from wind and sun, and his grimy grin was so fixed it might have been painted. Yellowish whisker stubble was smeared on his chin and neck. He came forward in a sort of rolling slouch, his hands balled, stuffed into the pockets of his overalls. Under the overalls he wore no shirt and the fat on his chest moved with a greasy undulation as he breathed; one nipple was not covered by the bib of the overalls and it shone, obese; it was like the breast of a girl just come to puberty. Though he wore no shirt he wore a hat, a misshapen black felt object which looked as if it had been kicked a countless number of times. He must have been in his late fifties.
“Who are you?” Peter asked. Thin and ragged query.
“Well,” he said. “I’m Ed Morgan. I live a little ways back over yonder.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder pointing north. “I was just kind of follerin’ along the creek here. I’ve got me some muskrat traps strung out along the creek, and I was just checking up on them. Course it’s a little late in the day, but I been busy all morning.”
He didn’t ask the question he wanted to, but the first one that came to his mind. “Why is it late in the day?”
The fat man gave him a wide ingenuous stare. “Why,” he said, “a man ought to get down to his traps first thing in the morning. A mushrat’ll just chew off his foot and get away. Or even if he is good and drownded might be an old mongrel dog’ll come along and carry him off. I ought to got down here real early, but like I said I been busy this morning.”
“Who gave you permission to trap along here?” In the fat man’s manner there was a careless oily geniality, an attitude of unmovable self-possession, which irked Peter, made the muscles along his shoulder blades feel as if they might begin to twitch. He gave his question a flat tone.
“Well now, I guess nobody did,” he said. “I never have thought about that. I just always have set out my traps here. My daddy did, and I reckon his daddy before him. Tell the truth, I was just getting ready to ask you folks what you was doing here. And then I thought maybe I better not.” The dingy grin never left his face, not even when he jerked his head aside to loose a spate of tobacco.
Without moving his body he drew himself up stiffly. “I’m Peter Leland,” he said. “I own this farm.”
For what seemed a long time the old man just looked at him. “Well, I declare,” he said finally. “You must be Miz Annie’s grandbaby. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard her tell all about you. She set a lot of store by you, you being a preacher and all. Law, she was just as proud of you as a peacock. I don’t believe there was ever what you’d call a whole lot of preachers in the Leland family.”
He felt the fat man’s eyes gauging him, measuring his weight, his probable worth. He would probably look at his caught muskrats in the same way. Peter felt nettled to the point of exasperation. “Am I to understand that you live on this farm?”
“Well, honey, I reckon so. Unless you was to take a notion to put me off. As far as I ever heard tell of, us Morgans has always lived right here on the Leland farm, and even before that, back when it was the old Jimson place. And no telling how long before that, no telling how long we might’ve been here.”
His grin broadened slightly, and Peter had the impression that in the measuring of himself he had been found lacking. Not a pleasant impression. He let the muscles of his forearms relax and found, surprised, that since the little man had come he had been stifling the impulse to strike him in the face. This fat old man’s assurance bordered upon, without trespassing into, cockiness. Peter sharply resented being called honey.
“No one told me there was a tenant family on the farm. Mr. Phelps didn’t say a word about it.” Mr. Phelps was the lawyer who had made the title arrangements, had done all the legal work.
Morgan lifted his hat, scratched the back of his head. Atop his head was a perfectly circular bald spot, the size and color of the crown of a large toadstool. “Well I declare I don’t know,” he said. “I guess maybe we been here so long now that folks just takes us for granted. All I know’s we been here a long time.” His gaze shifted momentarily. “Is that your pretty little wife?”
Sheila still sat on the grass, her knees caught to her chest. Again her face reddened slightly. She gave Morgan a short jerky nod.
“Yes, this is Mrs. Leland,” Peter said. He was unwilling to say it; he felt somehow as if he were giving away an advantage.
“She sure is a pretty little thing,” he said. “I reckon she’s about the prettiest Leland woman I ever seen.”
She pulled a weed, flung it down again, a gesture of overt annoyance.
He sharpened his tone, cut through the thread of this subject. “Where do you live then? I suppose you have a house on the farm.” He felt that the brunt of her annoyance fell upon him rather than upon Morgan, and this exasperated him; it was unfair.
Again the old man jerked his thumb over his flaccid shoulder. “Just right up yonder, across the creek. You could see it from here if it wasn’t for this here thicket. You want to come on over, I’ll take you around. It ain’t much, but it’s what we’re used to, what we’ve always had.”
“I think maybe I’d better,” Peter said. “I’d better see what I’ve got into.” He turned to her. “Do you want to come along, sweetheart?”
She let drop another weed stem from her fingers. “Not this time,” she said. She rose and brushed off her slacks with ostentatious care. “I’ll go back to the house. There’s so much work I have to do.”
“I’ll be along shortly,” he said, turning from her regretfully. Morgan had already started through the underbrush, parting the branches carelessly before him, letting them slap back.
Sheila began to gather the debris of the meal, piling everything into the basket. There was still a quarter bottle of wine. She screwed the cap more tightly, looking at the bottle with ran almost sorrowful expression.
He followed along clumsily in Morgan’s wake. The grass was strident with insects and an occasional saw brier clawed at his trousers legs. Once he almost tripped because the earth around the mouth of a muskrat hole crumbled under his foot. A very narrow footlog lay across the stream; the top of it was chipped flat, bore the
marks of the hatchet, but worn smooth. Morgan crossed before him, his hands nonchalantly in his pockets, but Peter had to go gingerly, holding out his arms to balance himself. Once through the thicket on the other side of the creek, they could see Morgan’s house. It was a low weather-stained cabin, nudged into the side of the hill so that while the east end of the house sat on the ground, the wall and the little porch on the west side were stilted up by six long crooked locust logs. There was a tin roof which didn’t shine but seemed to waver, to metamorphose slightly, in the sunny heat. Few windows and dark, and a stringy wisp of smoke from the squat chimney. In a corner of the yard of hard-packed dirt below the house sat a darkened outhouse.
“There it is yonder,” Morgan said. “I reckon you can tell it ain’t much, but it’s what we’re used to. It’ll do for us, I guess.”
Before them lay what must once have been a fairly rich field of alfalfa; now it was spotted with big patches of Queen Anne’s lace and ragweed, and the alfalfa looked yellow and sickly, its life eaten away at by the dodder parasite. Morgan waded through it cheerfully, obviously complacent about the condition of the crop, and Peter kept as much as possible in the fat man’s footsteps. He felt that he didn’t know what he might step into in that diseased field.
They went over the slack rusty barbed wire that enclosed the yard and went around the house to the low back stoop. There was a familiar kitchen clatter inside, but when Morgan stepped up on the wide slick boards all noise from inside ceased suddenly. He turned around, grinning still and even more broadly than before. “Come on in,” he said. “We’re just folks here.”
He entered. At first he couldn’t breathe. The air was hot and viscous; it seemed to cling to his hair and his skin. The black wood range was fired and three or four kettles and pans sat on it, steaming away industriously. The ceiling was low, spotted with grease, and all the heat lay like a blanket about his head. The floor was bare, laid with cracked boards, and through the spaces between them he could see the ground beneath the house. There was a small uncertain-looking table before the window on his right, and from the oilcloth which covered it large patches of the red-and-white pattern were rubbed away, showing a dull clay color. From the ceiling hung two streamers of brown flypaper which seemed to be perfectly useless; the snot-sized creatures crawled about everywhere; in an instant his hands and arms were covered with them. And through the steamy smell of whatever unimaginable sort of meal was cooking, the real odor of the house came: not sharp but heavy, a heated odor, oily, distinctly bearing in it something fishlike, sweetly bad-smelling; he had the quick impression of dark vegetation of immense luxuriance blooming up and momentarily rotting away; it was the smell of rank incredibly rich semen.
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