by Laura McNeal
He took out his binoculars, adjusted the focus, and trained them on her moving form. He didn’t like it very well, though. Her walk was all grace and smoothness when you watched with the naked eye, but the glasses made her jumpy. But at the mouth of the barn she stopped and peered in and he could see her face in profile. Her tight, smooth face seemed so suddenly close that he held his breath. His watching now seemed almost intimate.
And then a surprise. Her face, which had been hard and determined, suddenly relaxed into a kind of softness. But why? What had happened?
Clare lifted his eyes above the field glasses. She was just standing there at the barn door looking in but even from this distance he could see that something had gone out of her. Her body was no longer rigid; her fierceness was gone. She stayed like that for a few seconds, just standing and looking in, and then she turned and walked beyond the barn past the empty pigpen, through the mist along the cut toward the creek. Artemis stole up behind her and began to amble alongside.
Clare watched them until they slipped down the cut and into the low fog and trees.
He set his field glasses into their case, put on his boots in the mud porch, and walked out to the barn.
His father was bent over the barrel stove, feeding in scraps of wood. Clare came closer until his father heard him and turned.
“Well, well,” he said. “Son One.”
His father’s little joke. There had never been and never would be a Son Two. Clare looked around. “What are you doing?”
His father cast his eyes off into the dimness. “Oh, there’s always something needing doing.” Then: “How are things indoors?”
“Kind of gloomy.” He waited a second or two. “Did you see Aldine?”
“See her where?”
“She came out to the barn. Mom in a real mean way told her to go put some decent clothes on her body and Aldine ran upstairs and put on her heavy clothes and marched out here like she was going to quit teaching and leave or something but she looked into the barn for a few seconds and then she just walked on.”
His father looked over to the barn door. Finally he said, “No. I didn’t see her.”
It fell silent. Clare was trying to make sense of the barn and his father but there was nothing to see or hear. A dove coo-cooing in the rafters was all. “Need me for anything?” Clare asked.
His father raked his fingers through his beard. “You might clean the water pan for the chickens. But otherwise stay or go as you please.” He smiled an unhappy smile. “It’s Christmas Day after all.”
Clare found the pail.
His father said, “Went on walking where?”
Clare had two pails in hand. “What?”
“You said the girl went on walking. Where did she go?”
“Oh. Toward the creek.”
Clare pumped and hauled water to the chicken house, then cleaned the mash residue from the pan, which Neva should have been able to do at her age but nobody asked her to. Cleaning the mash sludge made his fingers dirty and cold. Since Aldine had come, he didn’t like wiping his hands on his pants so he just put them in his pockets. On his way back to the house he walked past the barn without looking in so that his father wouldn’t think of something else he might do.
He tugged off his boots, then stood in the front room, still hot from the fire, too hot, he thought. He could hear the clinking of dishes in the kitchen, the dull movement of sullen bodies. They were all in there, he was almost sure. He padded up the stairs. What he was doing was less a decision than a response to a persistent hunger—he felt himself pulled up the stairs in the same way he would move toward the smell of bread baking in the kitchen.
The door was wide open. Her room was a mess. Inside, he took a deep breath and could smell her smell. It was as warm in the room as it might be in summer, but it wasn’t summer—through the window he could see the mist-covered corral and, beyond the gray ground fog, the stand of stark cottonwoods. The heat made the smells of her keener, and he felt almost as if he was no longer the Clare he had been until this moment but someone else, less tethered, who was moving in a wondrous dream. He picked up thrown bedding and smelled it before putting it neatly back into place. He pulled smooth the corners of the quilt. He smelled the pillow and pressed it to his face. He closed drawers, then opened others. He saw her threadbare underthings and stared at them a long time lying there in the drawer, and willed himself to close the drawer, but he could not. The slip was soft and had holes along the waistband and smelled of washing soda and borax. He wished he could buy her a new slip, and other things, too. He slid a finger through one of the holes and made it slightly bigger and then he folded it carefully and set it back just as it had been. When he eased open her flowered satchel he saw the Riverside Shakespeare. And then he was holding it. She’d marked her place in The Merchant of Venice, which he supposed she was reading. The bookmark was funny, though. All of the flowers, the letters on the petals . . .
It was quiet in the room and yet something made his whole body stiffen and turn.
Charlotte stood in the doorway staring at him.
Her eyes were bright. It was the cat inside her and he was the mouse. She said, “And what are you doing?”
How long had she been there? What had she seen? He felt wooden and numb and yet began to move. He moved toward the door and when she stepped aside, he went past her. He did not say a word. Neither did she. It was not until he was inside his own room with the door closed behind him that he realized that he still had the bookmark in his hand.
He clamped his eyes shut. Washington, he thought. Adams Jefferson Madison Monroe Adams Jackson Van Buren . . .
Ansel put a heavy log on the fire in the oil-drum stove, then set out toward the creek. He didn’t try to steal up on the girl, nor did he whistle or sing to announce his presence, but still he was surprised to come upon her sitting on a boulder smoking a cigarette and staring at him. Artemis was looking at him, too, her tail sweeping back and forth, but just looking. Ansel supposed that was how she knew to look up.
“You okay?”
“I am,” she said.
The certainty with which she said it kept him from approaching further.
“Clare said Ellie spoke to you sharply.”
“She did.”
“Well, that’s just Ellie.” It sounded disloyal. He said, “She deserves more.”
This time her voice was less harsh. “I’m sure we all do,” she said. She inhaled from her cigarette, then let its smoke spew into the cold air. He’d never seen her with cigarettes before, but it was clear she was not new to the habit. He was surprised how knowing it made her look, and how much that became her.
“But you’re okay?” he said. “You’re warm enough? Because I’m going back and won’t need my jacket.”
“It’s cold but not so cold,” she said. Then she looked around. “I just wanted to be . . .”
Alone. Without question that was the word on her tongue.
“Yes. Of course. But you’ll be back in a bit?”
She nodded.
And so he left. Artemis tried to follow, but he shooed her back. The dog would be at least some company and comfort to the girl.
Everyone came for dinner, but nobody acted like they wanted to. Neva set Milly Mandy Molly on the table, propped against her water glass so she could see everything. Neva hoped her father would say something silly like “No monkey business at the dinner table,” but he didn’t say anything at all. Nobody did. Her father said the blessing and everyone mumbled the amens. Plates were passed and people ate and all the time nobody talked. The pheasant with the kumquat glaze was good but it didn’t really taste good with nobody talking. She said, “Milly Mandy Molly took a long nap and when she woke up she asked, ‘Why is the house so quiet?’”
Nobody gave her an answer, not even Clare or her father, who always answered her questions. They just kept chewing. It was hot in the room but when she went to take the green velvet waistcoat off of Milly Mandy Molly, it made
her look naked, so she put it back on.
Finally, when everyone’s plate was almost empty, Charlotte’s face got that meanness behind it that she got sometimes and she said, “Aldine, if you’re missing your bookmark, it’s because Clare has it.”
Before Neva had even turned to him, Clare’s face was red as a beet. She had never seen someone’s face go red that fast. He put his eyes down and said, “I took it by mistake. I didn’t mean to take it.”
“He was in your room,” Charlotte said and now everyone was looking at Clare.
“The door was open. I was just straightening up.” He didn’t look at anybody and even if it wasn’t an awful lie, it sounded like one. Finally he looked at Aldine. “Before you left, it sounded like a tornado up there.”
Neva could tell her parents were just wondering who should scold him first, and suddenly for no reason she said, “Tornado Aldine!” and Aldine looked at her for a second and then she started a giggling laugh. It was such a wonderful thing, her giggling, then laughing, so Neva was glad to laugh, too, and then her father and Clare were laughing, even if nobody really knew why. Only her mother and Charlotte weren’t laughing and somehow that made the rest of them laugh harder. Finally when the laughter was done, Aldine said, “It was a bit of a tornado up there, wasn’t it then? So thank you, Clarence, for making it tidy.” And though it didn’t mean that everyone started talking again, at least she and Milly Mandy Molly would have the giggly laughter to talk about when they were alone and it was safe to discuss it.
When finally the meal was done, Clare shoved back from his plate and left the table without a word. His body felt as numb and stiff as it had when he’d been caught in her room and he’d walked like a zombie past Charlotte, who he thought would keep his secret if only to barter with it, but she hadn’t. She’d spent her secret on humiliating him.
Upstairs in his room he took one last look at the bookmark to memorize its images and words and then he went up to the attic. Her door was again open, but he did not let himself step inside. He wedged the bookmark in plain sight under the edge of the keyhole plate. He glanced into the room. It was orderly now. It was funny that she left the door open again. Probably she was just letting the heat in. It was pretty hot, though, even more than before. It was like all the heat climbed up the stairs and got hotter and hotter where it had nowhere else to go. He went back to his room. He grabbed his jacket and wrapped it around his binoculars and went out. On the way he stopped in front of Aldine and without looking at her he said, “I put it back.” She asked what he’d put back and he said, “The bookmark with the writing on it. I put it on your door.” Then he went out. By circling around the barn and out to the stand of cottonwoods east, he found a place to hide and watch. They would uproot the trees this summer or next. His father had wanted to do it for three summers now and sooner or later he always did what he wanted to do. But Clare was glad the trees were still there. He found a fallen log among the shrubby cover and from there he could peer out from the trees and keep his military field glasses trained on her window.
First she found the bookmark wedged in the keyhole plate. With the words on it, he’d said, but there were no words except those written on the petals. Divination. Seizeth. Disshevell’d. Breatheth. Words, just words, she thought. Then, when she went to slip the bookmark back into the Riverside Shakespeare, she found a folded note poking from the top of the pages.
It said, Here come and sit, where never serpent hisses, And being set I’ll smother thee with kisses.
A pen had been used and the printing was plain and careful. It was not signed. Clarence’s work, she thought at once. Whose else might it be? The poor lad was smitten. He had been in her room. He had taken her bookmark. He had brought it back and the folded note with it.
She’d brought the lines from the poem to the light of the window, and now she was staring out. Smother thee with kisses. It gave her the smallest bit of a thrill—she couldn’t deny it—even if it did come only from Clarence. For it had to be he. He went thick and scarlet in her presence, and that shy beguiled type was just the one to resort to a love verse anonymously delivered. He wasn’t a bit hard to look upon, with the deadly shy smile, but he was a babe all the same. She lived in his house, used the same bog, was trusted by his parents to lead no one astray. She folded the note closed. A gesture as useless as it was sweet, and that she might’ve liked it otherwise changed it not an iota.
But though she’d closed the note, she wasn’t ready to release the feeling. The room was more than warm—it was nearly torrid—so she closed the door to the rising heat. She considered opening the window, but that was too much—letting cold air in when so often she’d lain in this room with frozen bones. She took off her dress, the black one with seashells—she’d meant to wear the pink with the brown bow, but her mood after Mrs. Price’s words to her had turned dark—and hung it carefully in the wardrobe. She lay then on the bed paging through Venus and Adonis, nearly endless though it was, rereading certain of the verses. It was delicious that lines like these rose free as you please from pages that had lain unlocked in the country schoolhouse. Oh wouldn’t she like to have plump Mr. Josephson on hand when his sleeveen daughter, reading aloud for one and all, found Venus comparing herself to a park where Adonis-the-deer was invited to graze! Wouldn’t that be a taste to savor.
The smallest smile had formed on her lips. You are bad, she told herself. You are bad and rude and randy. Yet the small smile remained.
She closed the book and went to the window. She stood back a bit but there was nothing but fog and field and bare trees, so who was there to see? When Mr. Price or Clarence were seen out of doors, they were always going out to or coming from the fields to the west, or to the barn in the same direction. It had affected her, seeing him in the barn. She’d gone out to quit or complain or scream—she didn’t know what entirely—and then when she’d peered in, there he was squatting down, feeding coal into his stove, calm as could be, one piece after another, and then when he was satisfied, he stood slowly to full height and somehow with his beard and bigness she was put in mind of a tree, a stout sturdy tree just planted there staring into the fire and thinking his faraway thoughts.
Something, a kitchenlike clank from downstairs, brought her up from this reverie and she took away at once the hand at her chest. Idle hands, the devil’s playground, Aunt Sedge liked to say, and Busy hands are happy hands (on this theme, she and Leenie had done some smirky laughing about George Prendergast’s happy hands). But still, Sedge had a point, so Aldine propped herself against the bedstead and began to knit. Slip two, hold in front, knit two, knit two. Purl two, knit two, knit two, purl two. She was doing scarves, clever ones, with cabling, to give the students for end-of-year gifts—all the girls, anyway, the boys wouldn’t want them. She’d thought first of scarf and hat as the prize for the first plane to the end of its string, but she’d never seen such a hat or scarf on a lad, so she’d traded a scarf for a goldfish with a long silvery tail, which everyone seemed to want. Neva, who wanted it most of all and who had been in front of all others, was now falling back because of being croupy so often, or whatever it was that made the cough. There was a lemon downstairs among the Christmas bounty. Aldine wished she had some carrageen moss. She’d always liked picking it at the seashore and drying it on a hot rock and it would be just the thing for little Neva, a hot drink of moss and lemon juice. Well, she would just have to make Neva a scarf of her own no matter how far her plane got, something with the brightest colors she had, to go with a beret just like her own.
She laid down her knitting and opened the note without really meaning to. Here come and sit, where never serpent hisses, And being set I’ll smother thee with kisses. She couldn’t help it. Reading the note was better than reading the poem. It was like having it whispered to her. It gave her a little glow like the one she used to have in school when someone told her that a boy liked her. She let herself enjoy the feeling as she assayed the ups and downs of the letters, the malen
ess of the writing, and smoothed her fingertip along the indentations in the paper where the writer had pressed down hard.
It had been a strange Christmas Day, Charlotte thought. Strange but good.
She was washing the dishes slowly, moving them from wash water to rinse water, setting them in the drainer. They’d gotten the swell food from Aunt Ida and Uncle Hurd and the most beautiful presents from Opa. And her mother had given it to His Highness, given it to him good, which made her feel a little sorry for him, but it was good for him every now and then, when his subjects finally squealed. Maybe they would move. Maybe they would move and have oranges and kumquats and blue skies and people around to talk to.
“Milly Mandy Molly’s tired again,” Neva said. She sat on the floor with the stuffed monkey curled up in her lap and their mother, who had barely spoken ten words since the revolt against His Highness, said, “Why don’t you and she go to your cot and take a nap?”
Neva nodded and carried the doll-monkey away.
They were alone then, she and her mother, which was often the moment when her mother would share a thought, but she wasn’t talking today.
Outside the barn, smoke rose from the stovepipe. Her father had gone back in there after dinner and there, she supposed, he would stay. Now the barn would get warm and the house would fall cold. Just then Clare rounded the barn—where had he been?—and went off with a pail toward the cowshed so there would soon be the separator to clean.