“You’ve never come to me for anything.”
“I’m content with my dreams as they are.”
“I think you have more power than you admit.”
“Mr. Owens, I have absolutely no power over anything but myself.” She leaned in toward him as if to share some secret. “I think I understand how your products work. And I am not in need of them.”
* * *
* * *
George and his father, Harold, helped each other harvest the sweet corn. Harold led his horse, Maisie, up and down the rows while George pulled the corn, shucked it quickly, and tossed it into the wagon. Mostly they worked in silence, as they were both quiet men. George concentrated on the work, thinking mainly things not lawful to be uttered about the heat and listening to the corn leaves hiss and the blackbirds caw, the thud of cobs when they hit the bang board at the top of the wagon.
If Ben had been there, he would have been chattering away like the birds, ripping at corn silk with his small fingers, and talking endlessly about baseball and fishing. George imagined a whisper in the green beneath the corn, but he did not know whose voice or memory of a voice he was straining to hear.
They had not spoken since early in the day, when Harold asked after Evie. George had opened his mouth to say, “Just fine,” like he always did. He thought about Evie and her new ways, eating so little, sleeping late some days, yet still moving through her tasks in a daze as if she slept not at all or had nightmares. There wasn’t anything his father could say, so he went ahead and offered his usual answer and got the usual nod in return.
The sun climbed higher and smaller into the sky and spread its heat over the blue all the way into the rubbed white edges of the horizon. Halfway through the morning, June came and found them, with her basket of biscuits and stone jug of cold lemonade. They sat in the shade of the wagon and took turns drinking.
“That hits the spot,” said Harold.
George agreed. The jug was smooth and sweating under his hands. It would keep the lemonade cold for hours.
“Got to get the quilting frame out later on, for your mother’s bee,” Harold remarked.
“Need any help?”
“Sure. Come back with me before you leave, you can help me set it up. Have to move some of the furniture around.”
“In the front room there?”
“Yup.” Harold drank. George noticed the way he handled the jug, turning it in his big hands as if he needed to grasp a certain spot before he could heft it. He seemed to tremble a bit with the weight, and his lips didn’t meet the opening just right, so a wet trickle of lemonade escaped his mouth and went down his chin, onto his shirt. George wondered how many years of hard work his father’s body had left. Each season had etched its own aches and failures deep within, around the bones, like rings through the trunk of a tree.
George expected Evie would be along to help with the bee, though he’d never seen her quilt at home, only the piecework. It was one of those secret things only women could do, like twisting shapeless masses of yarn into sweaters and mittens and turning a dense bag of flour into airy loaves of bread. Everything Evie made was for George in some way infused with magic—George’s own work by comparison was blunt and plain. He knew how to plant and tend what he’d planted, but it was the ground, the sun and rain in turns, that worked all his miracles.
He thought about Evie steadily, but he did not know how to help her. Should he talk about Ben or stay silent? Should he hold her close or let her keep her distance? At night, while they lay in bed, he listened to her breathing. Despite its evenness and her lack of movement, he knew she was awake. He would wait and wait in silence for the change of sleep to engulf her, her breath to go deeper, her body to twitch, but he was so bone tired from the day that he always went off first. He was never able to catch her at it. Then, in the day, she seemed to confirm his suspicion that she did not sleep, not really. She yawned when she didn’t think he was looking, great gaping yawns that seemed as if they would crack the corners of her mouth. She sat with knitting or mending in her lap and stared into space, as if dreaming with her eyes open.
George felt helpless. Evie was taking no laudanum, but she was almost as lost to him now as if she were, glassy-eyed and vacant like Jenkins’s candy jar emptied out. He almost wished he were the kind of man who would slap her or shake her, though of course he never could. Surely something would come out of her then, her eyes roll forward and really see him—a yes or a no. He almost thought he could bear either answer, if only she came back into herself long enough to tell him. If she could, instead of this washed-out ghost of herself, just bring him the truth.
* * *
* * *
The monthly meeting of the Ladies’ Aid Society was being held at June Dawson’s place, and Evie went over early to help her get ready. Corn was coming up high in the fields where she walked, its stubbly green gathering tighter in the distance where it rolled away from her. The color of it cleaned her. George and Ben would have harvested together, Ben leading the horse between the rows while George pulled and husked the ears of corn, throwing them against the bang board into the wagon. Ben had thought that was great fun, begging turns to toss the corn like baseballs into the board.
Evie was carrying a tea cake she’d made, and George waved to her from his far-off post in the field, watched her for a stiff moment until she waved back. She shifted her basket from one hand to the other, and gradually her footsteps pushed George behind her. Ahead was the solid square of the Dawson house and George’s old window over the front parlor. After they were married, he had told her about the nectarine, sitting on the ledge like a lookout, losing moisture.
She was annoyed with him when he told her that. She had given him the fruit to eat, had pictured the juice when he broke its skin tickling into him because of her. Instead he had kept it like a lock of hair. He had taken something she had not given, in a spirit fundamentally different from the one she’d intended. She had long forgotten it was she who’d told him, however jokingly, not to eat it, and eventually she accepted his choice. He had tried to sculpt a permanence where there was none, and she realized, in fact, this was her own definition of love.
Now the windowsill was empty, and the white folds of the curtains drifted up from it in undisturbed lines. What had come into the world because Evie met George had so easily gone out of it again. The treetops flashed out of the window as the sun fixed the sky’s reflection there, and Evie’s chest pulled itself in. Her heart within her was like a stone cast into the sea, traveling down through the depths until it reached darkness, where pressure took the place of light and cracked things.
She arched herself, trying to shift the stone. Sometimes when she lay down at night, this internal structure tilted and her sorrow moved again, like a water bubble in a glass sliding away from an open mouth. She wondered, if it ever escaped from her and touched the air, would something change, the temperature or the wind, and burst it?
The big quilting frame was stretched out across June’s parlor with dining chairs banked around it in a square. Women sat at the quilt in all their aspects of concentration, quick needles bowing back and forth under the silver thimbles. The plan was to have it done in time for the county fair. It would be raffled off and the money to go to the mission. Evie was wedged in between Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Cartwright, and she felt a gathering of shyness like a drawstring, women trying to close ranks against the sadness.
Evie bent sleepily over her work while the conversation settled into her, stocking her mind the way the women did their cellars, potatoes and apples and onions and jars and jars and jars and jars. She yawned continually, as if she were riding an automobile up into the mountains, but her ears remained cottony.
“Did you see the shiner on Myrtle’s little boy last Sunday?”
“What was that all about?”
“They say one of the Boudreaux boys got him. That new young w
ife of his is overrun. . . . She’s lost all control over the children.”
Clucking tongues.
“Boys will be boys.”
“Try taking fewer stitches, Cora. It will be easier until you learn to make them smaller.”
“I think Harmon is buying dreams and not telling me about it.”
“No. What makes you think?”
“Something secretive about him when he’s getting ready for bed. And he’s always been such a grump. Suddenly he’s cheerful?”
Laughter.
“I should send Matthew to try it!”
“I could never go to him in a million years. It’d be too embarrassing.”
“I wouldn’t even know what to ask for.”
“I think it’s a cheat. But if it makes some people happy . . .”
The conversation was dropped and clattered to the floor like a tray when Cora stood up among them with a hand on her mouth, trying to excuse herself from behind it and leave the room. With the closeness of the chairs all wedged in around the work, she struggled and stumbled. They heard her footsteps scrabbling against the hall and dying down toward the back of the house. As the pull of her sounds fell slack, heads turned back toward the waiting patchwork.
June shrieked her chair back and announced in a bright, loud voice that she would go check on Cora and instructed them to carry on. She moved stealthily for a large woman, snuck up on her own kitchen, and found poor Cora retching into the sink.
“Oh, dear! Oh, my dear!” She rustled over and placed the sympathetic plumpness of her hand on Cora’s back while it heaved.
“I don’t know what’s the matter,” Cora gasped when her stomach was empty. “It just came over me. I’m awfully sorry.”
“Never you mind, dear,” said June, working the pump so Cora could splash her blotched face and rinse her mouth. “You did well not to be sick all over that quilt. Could you imagine?”
Cora managed a smile.
“You must have got a touch of that flu that’s going around. I think the whole Jones family took it, one after the other. We all thought it had finally run its course, but you never know with these things.”
She guided the girl upstairs and made her lie down. Cora was holding on to herself like a child, making her narrow shoulders seem even smaller. When June thumped back into the room of quilters, they had closed easily over Cora’s absence like water. The chatter continued, crawling nimbly over the spread-out history of the town—there was Sam McBryde’s old shirt, the one with the red checks his wife had hated. And Lucy Pearson’s good blue Sunday dress with the flowers she was so proud of, ruined when her jealous sister Rosie threw the inkwell at her in a fight. The bright flickers of all the fabrics that had skimmed those bodies, stuck to them sometimes through sweat, swirled around the excitement of ankles dancing, were all stitched now into a banner of their past. The busy needles poked it without mercy.
When the quilt was finished and the ladies were taking their leave, Cora was brought down, blinking her eyes hard as if she could squeeze the sleep away from them.
“I’m fine,” she kept insisting.
She and Christina got up behind their horse, and Christina took the reins.
“I feel much better now that I’ve rested. I’m not sure what came over me,” she was still murmuring as they drove away.
Evie stayed behind to help June clean up. She carried cups and plates from the parlor to the kitchen, and the two women worked the finished quilt out of its frame. In toward each other and back out they walked, marrying its corners between them. When the quilt was folded small enough, June held it to her chest.
“How are you getting on?”
Evie covered a yawn with her hand. She leaned over a displaced chair, picking it up.
“Well enough.” She straightened, the chair back framed in her arms. “We missed you while you were away. How’s Jim and the family?”
June was busy tucking the quilt onto a high shelf in her corner wardrobe. “Well, Isobel’s expecting again, and the little ones do run her ragged. I was glad to help for a bit, while I was there.” She closed the wardrobe door and moved to help Evie with the chairs. “I do hope that Cora makes it home without being sick again. I’m afraid bumping along behind that horse will just unsettle her worse.”
“Christina will look after her.” Evie went back to the kitchen and started on rinsing cups at the sink. “And Cora’s always been so hearty. No matter what everyone else is sick with, you’ll always see her minding the store. Even with all those people coming and going, sneezing and coughing on her, nothing ever seems to take.” She wiped at the blood-dark ring of tea stain on her cup’s interior.
“Strong as a horse, that one,” said June. She flapped out a towel to dry the cups Evie had finished. “The Jenkinses are all like that. Cora might look slight and bony, but she’s tough as leather inside her. Wiry, I guess. She has a kind of heart that burns real strong. She’s bright with it. Oh, well, guess it was finally her turn.”
“I guess so.”
“I hear she went walking, home from church not long ago, with that Mr. Robert Owens.”
“Did you?”
Evie rubbed hard at her cup. She grabbed the salt shaker and sprinkled it, rubbing again.
“Lands, child, it’s been that way for years, just leave it. You’ll scrub the color off yourself before ye’ve any effect on it.”
Evie ignored her.
“I wonder if that’s a match, there?” said June.
Evie looked up. “Cora and Mr. Owens?”
“That’s who I’m speaking of.”
“I just can’t imagine. Tom and Mary aren’t going to let her go off with him. He’d have to stay here.”
“So he could stay. Maybe he could decide to settle. Keeping the town in dreams, seems like he could do all right for them.”
“I’m not sure he makes so very much money from it. I wonder if he could support a wife, a family.”
June shrugged.
“He has no house to live in. I just can’t picture it,” Evie went on. She didn’t know why she was insisting, when it didn’t matter one way or the other.
She finished rinsing the dishes and picked up a towel.
“A house could be built for them,” said June. “The Jenkinses could do it.”
“They could. But Mr. Owens is a traveler. That’s the nature of his business.”
“It just seems to me . . . well, none of my affair. I can imagine that Cora with an older man. Someone to guide her. Someone to settle her down.”
Evie smiled. “You may have a point there.”
“You off to home, then?”
“Yes, I think I will. Supper won’t make itself.” She folded her towel and placed it gently next to the sink.
“I’m sorry, what I said earlier, about all Jim’s family. Isobel being pregnant. I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s not your fault. That’s just how things are.”
June was stacking the saucers and cups together again carefully. “And how are things, with you and George?”
“They’re fine,” Evie said quickly. “Just fine. He’s very busy with the crops, of course, and he’s tired when he comes in. We just stay quiet. We’re doing all right, though.” Evie watched the way one teacup rolled on its side to fit into the other, like a tiny ship capsized.
“Well, don’t stay too quiet. George is like that, you know. Well, of course you know. He doesn’t always say what’s on his mind, but inside he’s thinking away, thinking and thinking. Talking is good for him, but you have to make him talk. Otherwise he forgets.” She closed the cupboard door on her dishes and let her hands rest on the countertop. “If you remember Ben together, if you talk him over sometimes, that will be better, I think. For both of you.”
Evie looked at her. “I don’t know if I can. . . .”
&
nbsp; “I’ve been missing Benny’s visits this summer. He used to run over all the time, hoping for cookies or cake. I always gave him something. I told him he’d spoil his supper, and then . . . I gave them to him anyway.” She rubbed her eyes.
“You did,” Evie said. “You did spoil his supper.”
Chapter 21
Now whenever Robert went into the graveyard, he turned furtive, but he never did see Rose Whiting there again. Evie always met him in the afternoon, when George had come for dinner and gone and would be out in the fields until suppertime, and no one would miss her. Robert never mentioned the conversation he had with Rose, and neither did Evie, so he still wondered if she knew about it.
Today he stood at the back and waited, on the side away from Ben’s grave. He watched her coming and thought now that she knew what to expect from him, she walked differently, winding her way through the stones and taking her time. Then it was a simple exchange, a vial for some coins, and sometimes they sat together and talked about things. When she was close enough for him to make out her face, she smiled, because she knew what would happen and how he would be. He couldn’t decide if that made him happy to see her or not.
She sat down on a stone beside him as if she expected him to stay with her for a while. He saw she was often yawning and how it brimmed a pinkish wetness in her eyes.
“The potion is supposed to help you sleep better,” he said. “But now you seem tired all the time.”
She turned to him with one cheek resting in her hand.
“It takes time to fall asleep, and then I sleep the night through,” she said. “But there is something different. The sleep is so dark, like a blindness, but I’m half aware of things all night long. I remember in the morning the house-creaking sounds and all the times that George turned over. So when I open my eyes, I’m not sure if I’m waking up. I don’t know if I’ve really slept at all.”
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