“It’s been three or four years.”
“Do you know his wife’s name?”
“I knew their son,” I told her. “We went out in high school.”
She took off her glasses and looked at me kindly. “You’re better off without the ones you knew in those days, Cile. Let me tell you. The near misses I had must have turned my mother’s hair white.”
“He was the one for me.”
DREW WAS STANDING under the pecan tree when I pulled off the farm-to-market road, watching me race the storm. We got my car into the shed just as the sky darkened and began to hail icy pellets the size of mothballs.
“When we live here—” Drew said, wrapping an arm around me as we fled toward the snug weatherbeaten house.
“You’ll still put the Firebird under cover; by then you’ll have it gilded like a baby shoe.”
“We’ll have a real garage. I’ll have got my ’57 Chevy Bel Air, bored-out, fuel-injected, two-eighty-three cubic inch V-8.”
“We can put them on blocks in the yard, all the old cars.”
“And keep turkeys.”
“And raise hogs.”
“Put up a sign in the yard saying BEWARE THE COW. And on the door: NO SOLICITORS OR PHYSICISTS.”
We pulled shut the heavy door and leaned against it kissing, the way we always did. As if we couldn’t make it across the hall to the bedroom.
The frame house had basically two large rooms down and two up, divided by wide halls. A later room had been added across the length of the back, for a kitchen and bath downstairs, and a sleeping porch upstairs. If we ended up with the four children here, at least for the summers, we’d put them upstairs and us down in the bedroom that had been made from the original parlor, across the hall from the dining-sitting room that opened into the kitchen. The old house would be crowded—the idea of our kids all sharing one bath blew the mind. But his mannerly boys wouldn’t have a lot of time for us, what with prep school and summer camp, at which Trey would this year be a counselor-in-training and next year a counselor, with Jock not far behind. How mine would deal with it here, I could guess. Cow wrangles would be a daily matter. But sticking it out here a few summers eating creamery butter, and homemade hand-churned ice cream with local peaches, and pecan-fed ham for breakfast would certainly toughen them up for the real world: a crowded planet wanting to raise grains and livestock, grasses and atom smashers, all on the same rolling land.
Drew pulled down my jeans and pulled off my T-shirt, which today was slightly damp even though I’d worn a windbreaker over it. This was a ritual, me standing there with jeans around my ankles while he undid his heavy longhorn belt buckle (once his dad’s) and let his own jeans fall with a clang to the wood floor. It felt every time I came up here as if we’d just slipped off into some empty house to which parents were due to return any minute. And even as we kissed our way into bed, piling feather pillows behind us against the massive carved headboard, crazy with being back together again, touching each other all over, we were always listening. For the grown-ups, parents we’d once had.
We did it the first time missionary, not able to get to each other fast enough, and then rolled over, still connected, and did it again, slower, with me on top. Drew put a George Strait tape on, and “Heaven Must Be Wondering Where You Are” drifted around the room, filling our ears. I lay there thinking how unbelievable it was to be together, amazed and happy that we were really going to have it like this forever and forever. Until we were old decrepit folks with wooden walking sticks and hearing aids and watery eyes, loving each other out of our nightshirts, saying, Oh, Lord, God, did you ever think we’d be so lucky?
By the time we were back in our jeans in the kitchen, the hail had stopped. While Drew made us breakfast, I opened the back door. The air was fresh and clean; past the old slatted white weather station, across the grassy field, a line of dairy cows moved slowly into the open.
I’d brought a bowl of cooked potatoes, which Drew made into hash browns, and a stick of butter that he used to stir them with and to brown the thick slices of fresh bread I’d got at the Czech bakery on the way. He fried eggs in the fat from slices of slab bacon he’d cooked in a big iron skillet which looked as old as the house, and most likely was—someone had loved to cook here once. He put coffee on to boil in a blue marbled tin pot, blackened through the years, tossing in an eggshell to settle the grounds. The electric twelve-cup perc pot on the tile counter worked fine, but he liked to fix a greasy, old-time, wood-stove type of breakfast. Which meant boiled coffee so strong it socked a fist into your stomach, in blue tin cups that conducted all the heat, so that you had to hold the handles with napkins until they cooled down.
The big kitchen, with its old table, was the kind with pans hanging from nails, and mason jars holding whisks, wooden spoons, spatulas. The white-painted boards of the walls were hung with signs from his granddad’s time: WE SELL SHELL, BUY FROM THE PUMP, DRINK DR. PEPPER. And, over the stove, STRIKE MATCHES HERE. Two posters behind dusty glass indicated even older times. One, showing a very young man in uniform, warned HALT THE HUN. The other was a framed page of a story from The Boy’s Own Paper, dated January 5, 1901, the year his granddad was born.
While Drew served our plates, I read aloud from it:
“There was sorrow in their hearts and tears in their eyes as they stood for a few minutes and gazed back at the grand old building where they had studied so long and had so many escapades and so much jollity and fun.”
When we were mopping up our egg yolks with the tail end of the bread, the hash browns and bacon long gone, Drew poured us a final enamel-chipping cup of the boiled coffee. Behind him on the counter, lunch waited its turn: two T-bones as thick as his thumb, and a sack of peach kolaches from the Czech bakery.
Grinning at me like a kid at Christmastime, he said, “Honey, what took us so long?”
“We should have run away the day we graduated high school.”
“You could be waiting tables and I could be pumping gas.”
“You could be running a weather station and I could be teaching school,” I said.
“Yeah.” He nudged my foot with his under the table. “This is great, isn’t it?”
“We can do this all the time, can’t we, when we’re actually here?”
“If I’d known it was going to be this easy, shit—”
“I know. I expected to be put in the stockade in front of the church.”
“I guess we’re kidding ourselves a little. It isn’t over yet. I mean, Mary Virginia has not mentioned word one about bullion, ingots, gold, lucre, community property accounts, settlements—in other words, she hasn’t started thinking about it yet. Her last handful of new jackets—fruit colors, that’s what’s new, lemon, orange, lime—and those tiny skirts that are here today and going to be gone yesterday, came to, are you ready for this, five gee, I mean three of each, and she’s telling me what an unbelievable bargain, how her mom and sister know this little place. I’m thinking that was the down payment on a house when we got married. When I was a kid, it was the price of a good car. That was last week, the fruit suits.”
I didn’t comment. I’d never talked about money with Drew or his wife; it was like a butcher talking to somebody in pork futures. We weren’t in the same frame of reference. My idea of fluctuating income had mostly to do with whether the potato bake was going to have heavy cream or canned milk. But they had seemed to me mismatched from the start: her always wanting what was new, him hanging on to anything that was old.
“Eben said you were getting out because the price of land up north has gone from five hundred to seven thousand an acre. He must have got that from Lila Beth. Maybe Mary Virginia wants to see how high it goes?”
“I heard. I heard the same thing.” He groaned. “It’s a big power competition. Our collider has to be more super than Europe’s collider; our fifty-three miles of tunnel, compared to which Europe’s is just an underground Hula Hoop, a better conductor. It’s the new space wars, su
bsoil space. What they don’t know is that when they get through spending all that money and time smashing atoms to find the alpha particle that started it all, the earth isn’t going to work anymore. It’s going to be like the kid who tears apart a clock to see what makes it tick.”
He poured us two glasses of milk from a pitcher on the counter, cool country milk to line our stomachs against the coffee. “What they don’t know, Cile, is that the soil around here has taken ten thousand years to form, that’s how long it takes to make a hundred inches of blacklands out of mud and chalk and decaying plants. We’ve only had a plow in the ground here for a hundred and fifty. They don’t compute that if the U.S. loses even two of its crop-producing states, it’ll lose its surplus and be starting down the road to starvation. But you know the federals: they think farm is a hyphenated word with subsidy.” He stopped. “You want to hear this?”
“I want to hear it.”
“They gave us, everybody holding land up there, a twenty-five-pound, ten-thousand-page environmental impact study. It’s phone book size and then some. I’ve got it at the office, using it as a doorstop.”
His face was red thinking about his least favorite topic. He poured the last of his milk into his coffee cup. “First my great-granddad gave up the right-of-way, that’s when fences came in, then my granddad leased out the mineral rights, then in Dad’s day he had to give up riparian rights, that’s navigable streams, or hell, I don’t know, maybe it’s just running water. So now you own your land, see, but not the roads crossing it or the oil and gas under it or the creek running through it. Next thing, they’ll sublet the air, sky rights, so you’ll own, say, from the surface of your pasture up maybe twenty-five feet, free and clear except for vertical easements. Just like offshore drilling. Off-ground probes.”
I ran my foot up his leg under the table, wanting him to know I sympathized.
He fiddled with the cassette player until he got us “Second Chances,” a nice country waltz we liked, and that calmed him down. “I bought this extra tape,” he said, “duplicate, so I could leave the other in the pickup, see. I went in this record store that doesn’t sell records anymore, and asked this girl, ‘Where’s your George Strait?’ She said, ‘Is that easy listening?’ I said ‘Country,’ but I must have looked at her like she was crazy, because she said, real defensive, ‘I only know the music of my generation.’ Can you believe it? I had to spell Strait. S-T-R-A-I-T. Then when she saw me squinting at the little tapes, she said, ‘You want me to read the titles for you?’ I looked at her, this seventeen-year-old punk, and I got to thinking, if her pa was eighteen when he had her, her dad could be five years younger than me! Her generation. What’s that if it’s not what’s on the radio? What does she know? Crudescence and the Maggots? Gag Reflex? Even my boys know who George Strait is. Don’t they? How do I know what they know? What do preppies listen to?”
“She was just nervous,” I said. “It was her first sale. Her folks don’t think she can hold a job.”
“Yeah, I know.” He caught my foot with his hand. “I just want this to be over, this part, don’t you?”
“Show me the bikes,” I said.
At the back door he grabbed a hat from the hat rack and hooked a finger in the waist of my jeans. “God, won’t it be great when we’re here all the time?”
DREW LIKED POKING around in the shed, which was a single car garage with barn doors, freestanding from the house and filled with treasures.
“We’ll extend it here,” he said, gesturing with his right hand. “Then I’ll find that old ’57 Chevy stuck in somebody’s garage, they don’t know it’s worth sixty gee, they let me have it cheap, what they paid for it. One of those cars that somebody had and only drove it to church.”
“What did your dad do with his cars?”
“Traded them in every other year. He thought a doctor should have a new car; or maybe my mother thought that. How do I know? I know the reason all the stuff out here is in such good condition is because Dad’s folks lived here and used the place, took care of it. They didn’t care that the chairs were Stickley chairs, big antiques, they kept them fixed because kitchen chairs were for sitting on in the kitchen. I don’t know how my mother kept her hands off the stuff up here. You know those things on the wall in the bedroom, used to be the parlor, one shows a bear hunt and one a buffalo hunt? They happen to be Pratt pot lids worth about a grand each. Granddad and his wife just liked how they looked.”
“I’m going to miss the parsonage,” I said. “Your grandparents had nice houses.”
“Yeah, I wish you could keep it. We could use it in town. I’m going to have to keep the office there, for the paperwork.”
“Just think,” I said, leaning against him while we talked, “we can go anywhere together in the city we want to. We can eat in Circleburgers, we can eat barbeque at Eva Lee’s, we can toss a few at the Greatest Little Horseshoe Pits in Texas. We can—”
“Don’t remind me of back home. I can feel panic sneaking up on me when you do. It’s been two days and she hasn’t said one single let’s-talk-about-who’s-paying-who-how-much word. You know how the hair on the back of your neck rises up? I bet right this minute she’s talking to some Dallas lawyer on the phone. Make that plural. Getting all her ammunition loaded in the cannon.”
“How’d you ever find the bikes in here?” I was looking at farm equipment and tools six feet deep along the back of the shed.
He gestured behind the implements. “We’re going to fix them up. We’re going to rebuild them and then rebuild the Pontiac—” he patted my car, which was taking up most of the front of the shed—“so we can toodle all around the blacklands like vigilantes, checking up on what the federals are doing. Pa and Ma Williams.” He pulled me against the side of the Firebird, kissing me the way he used to against his old fixed-up pickup.
The bikes were great; he was right. I could see, when he uncovered them, that they were in amazing shape, with fitted “slipcovers” over each. Plus locks on the wheels, as if thieves were going to drive by and know to root around behind every neat stack of two-by-fours and four-by-eights in order to lift a couple of bicycles that looked like props from a late fifties movie. The Western Flyer—my bike—was just a basic boy’s red and white, with fat whitewalls, if that’s what you called the tires, and fat pedals and those things like streamers coming out of the handlebars. Drew’s was a Schwinn Black Phantom, totally deluxe, weighing in, he said, at sixty-five pounds. It was green and had enough chrome on it that you almost needed shades to look at it. Might they have been bought for him?
I could remember how gross these things had seemed when we were in high school; then everybody wanted lightweight imported bikes. I reminded Drew of that.
He shook his head. “The LeMond carbon-fiber racer I wanted to buy then? You couldn’t touch it now for under twelve gee. Minimum. Anyway, that’s not what you need on the farm-to-markets. What you need is what we got.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
For lunch, we ate our steaks, almost black on the outside, almost raw on the inside, and then had two peach kolaches from the Czech bakery, all of it washed down with a fresh cup of boiled coffee. We’d worked off breakfast messing with the bikes, getting them out. And then making love once more, feather pillows at our backs on the old four-poster.
Drew propped his 1927 Rolex Oyster on the table so we could watch the time. Usually after lunch we made a pallet on the floor and stretched out to talk, mostly about how someday we were going to tell them. Today we stayed at the table, to celebrate that we really had done it.
“I’m thinking of our wedding,” Drew said.
“Wedding? Bridesmaids, flower girls, ring bearers, rice, that kind of wedding? Maybe they’ll throw potatoes at ours.”
I could see him squirm around like a kid with a plan. “Not that kind.”
“A simple church wedding, with Eben officiating?”
“Not that kind. Anyway, you’re about to become an Episcopalian.”
&
nbsp; “Not me.”
“What do you care? You don’t believe all that.”
“Maybe not, but the Presbyterian church is the place in which I’m not going to believe it.”
“I’m thinking of a dance.” He looked happy with himself.
“A dance? A real honest dance? Somebody playing guitar and bass and piano? A big slick floor with sawdust on it?”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “Maybe we can do it at the Czech Fest. An anniversary, sort of, right?” He counted on his fingers. “A month, three weeks really, till Easter, call that a month. Another month, then we move out. Two more for the divorces. One more for all the snags. One more to pay off the Dallas lawyer, make that plural. That’s September. We can bring the kids all up to West for the Fest, then drive on over here for a big barbeque. I mean the real stuff, hill country best. The kind where the brisket’s been in that closed pit for thirty-six hours, with that burnt crust and the juice dripping out. We can have a band here, too. Hang lights from the trees.”
“How can you be thinking about food again?”
“I don’t have any trouble.” He rubbed his foot up the side of my leg. “A person eats when they get hungry in the country.”
“Is that right?”
He looked sly. “When are you going to tell your folks?”
“They can read about it in the papers.”
That’s more or less how I heard about them. Actually I heard it from Theo, back when she was Miss Moore and still my unfavorite teacher out of a crowd of contenders. Your daddy and I are going to tie the knot, those were her words. Maybe I’d drop by their house, over in the part of town where all the streets were named for birds, and tell her my news. The preacher and I are going to split; my boyfriend and I plan to tie the knot.
“Shorty’ll hear it from some fishing buddy, one of the retired coaches, and say, ‘Who? Cile? You mean my girl?’ ”
I laughed, because Drew did try to get under my skin talking about my daddy, and I didn’t mind letting him see that he had. Usually that meant his mind was on his mother. Anyway, mine was. “Do you think it’ll be all right at Lila Beth’s on Easter? I want it not to be awkward.”
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