by Jessie Haas
Bridle him: the giraffe game. Saddle him: always easy. Then I would lead him behind the barn where the hay was just cut and circle him on the long rope, teaching him my language. Walk. Trot. Whoa. No. No. No.
One afternoon I led the colt to meet Truman. It was a cooler day than usual, with a light breeze stirring the leaves. The colt walked on tiptoes, flaring his nostrils. A bright patch of sunlight on the ground stopped him in his tracks. A rustle in the bushes set him trotting around me like a carousel horse. I gave him a sharp smack on the neck. “Cut it out!”
At the corner I paused, intending to wait for Truman. I’d never seen a car here, but this was the main road, and with the colt in this mood I didn’t dare chance it.
He snatched at grass. “No, stand!” I brought his head up, and he gazed off across the fields, focusing on something I couldn’t see.
All at once he turned to look uphill. A bush blocked our view of the road. Is Truman coming? I wondered, when suddenly I heard knock—knock—knock-knockknock, a small, dense sound, very close.
That’s his heart!
Something’s going to happen! I stepped closer. “It’s all right. It’s Truman. It’s Jerry.” He ignored me, straining his ears forward, each breath deeper and quicker than the last.
Then he began to back. I went with him, close to the trampling hooves. He ducked left. I went that way, too, blocking him, moving with him. If he pulled against me in this deep a panic, he would certainly get away.
He backed, ducked right, then stopped and snorted, as loud as a locomotive’s brakes. I felt a mist on my face. He bobbed his head high, low, high again, stood still, and I risked a glance over my shoulder.
At the end of the lane Truman had halted Jerry. “Hey there, young feller!” he sang out. “Hey there!”
The colt’s head came down three inches. His ears swiveled forward and back, and sheepish creases appeared in his eyelids.
“There,” I said. “There.” I scratched his shoulder, where Belle used to scratch him as they stood under the willow tree. He scratched back. “Careful,” I said. “No teeth!” When the hardness went out of his scratching, he was calm, and I led him to greet Jerry.
“I heard his heart, Truman! I heard it: bump—bump—bump-bumpbump.”
“Like a pa’tridge drummin’,” Truman said. “That was good, the way you handled him.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“That’s right. You didn’t yell; you didn’t haul on him, or hold him too tight, or make any one of a dozen other mistakes. You kept your head.”
I did? “Not on purpose,” I said.
Truman’s beard and hatbrim seemed to close toward one another, his face retreating behind them. He was grinning under all that hair, as if I’d just said something clever and important. “Maybe next time you will,” he said.
I felt myself blushing and turned to the colt. His neck was low, and he stared into space, as if reliving his moment of terror. He looked exhausted. I stroked his neck. We’d been through something big together.
“He trusts you more,” Truman said.
I looked down. I never wondered whether he could trust me. I was always wondering whether I could trust him.
sixteen
Later that same afternoon, while we were in the hayfield, Dr. Vesper drove up. His lightweight buggy bobbed over the bumps. The horse stopped and perked his ears at our wagon, cheerful and idle as a man on vacation.
“Hey there, Harry! You look as lean as a wolf!”
“Hi!”
“Been an epidemic of health in Barrett, so here I am. Give you folks a hand?”
“Last load,” Uncle Clayton said. “Sairy, we can get this. Why don’t you two go on and have your talk?”
“Ride with me, Sarah,” Dr. Vesper said. “Between us maybe we can hold this buggy down.”
“I’ll bring the forks,” I said, and followed the buggy down the slope. I could hear my heartbeat, the way I’d heard the colt’s this morning. Soon I’d know—what? Something I didn’t know now. Something I didn’t want to know. I looked uphill. The load of hay bulked against the sky, and the two old men looked thin, bent, and knobby. I wanted to stay with them.
In the kitchen Aunt Sarah poured three tall glasses of buttermilk, and we sat at the table. Her face was brick red and sweating evenly all over, like the glasses.
Dr. Vesper held a cigar box in front of him. He fidgeted the lid up and down, up and down.
“Well, the house is sold,” he said abruptly. “Didn’t fetch quite what I hoped for, but your debts are paid, Harry, and you’ve got seventy-eight dollars in the Barrett Savings Bank.”
“Oh.” I didn’t seem to feel anything. Seventy-eight dollars. “Who bought it?”
“Mike Callahan, the mill foreman. He married Bridget Murphy, and they’ve got two little girls.”
“Oh.” How much did tuition at the Academy cost?
“So here’s your bankbook.” He opened the box and handed me the little leather book. “You need me or Sarah to sign for you if you want to withdraw any of it. And here’s the bill of sale for the house, and your mother’s deed, and some other papers she had. I come near throwin’ this box out, but Althea said we should look in it first.”
He pushed the box across the table, and my fingers closed around it. Seventy-eight dollars and a cigar box.
Dr. Vesper took a long swig of buttermilk and folded his lips in on themselves. “Harry.” He hesitated. “Well, I’ll just spit it out, and then I’ll know how you take it, won’t I? John Gale’s paid your shot at the Academy—three years up front, cash on the barrel.”
I saw him watching me, kind and sharp. I heard Aunt Sarah’s breath draw in, swelling with some unknown emotion. I must have looked blank because he reached across, squeezed my hand, and gave it a little shake. “You’re set, Harry! Tuition’s all paid!”
“I—” My head felt perfectly empty.
He had the sense to go on talking. “John, he didn’t want me to tell you it was him. Thought you might not take it. I said the Academy’ll take it, like a trout takes a fly! And I said I’d better tell you. No knowing what you might imagine otherwise. But John feels awful bad. Sold his automobile, so I hear—”
“Isn’t—isn’t it an awful lot of money?”
“No more ’n he can afford. He’s pretty well off, John Gale. Wanted to pay it all now to make sure ’twas done, he said. Didn’t want to rely on his heirs if anything should happen to him.”
He glanced at Aunt Sarah. Something he’d just said was not true, and he was checking if he’d put it over on her. She stared at the tabletop.
“So I’ll tell him, Harry, that you’ll let him do this? You aren’t offended?”
I tried to pull myself together. “Tell him—tell him thank you. I’ll … write him a letter.”
“Good girl. I guess it’s no more than right, though it wasn’t his fault. What do you think, Sarah?” He darted the question at her like a cow-dog nipping at the heels of a bull. Don’t, I thought.
She looked at him, and at me. I noticed the fine netting of lines all over her face. “I think Harriet had better start making progress with that horse,” she said, and pushed back from the table. “Doctor, will you stay to supper?”
Dr. Vesper smiled to himself and stood up. “No, thank you, Sarah. The Old Lady thought I might like to eat one meal with my knees under my own table. I was to give you a kiss, Harry. Walk me out to the buggy?”
A safe distance from the house, he puffed his breath out through his teeth. “Phew! That went better than I expected.”
“What? What did you say that wasn’t true?”
He draped his arm along the buggy wheel and studied me a moment. “You won’t forget how to smile up here, will you, Harry?”
My face heated. I looked down. What an awful thing to say!
“Hey!” he said gently. He reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “Are you doing all right?”
I nodded.
“It’s a lonely pla
ce,” he said, “when you’re the only young person.”
“I guess so.”
“Now you’re mad at me,” he said, making a wry, sad face. “In answer to your question, it’s all true except the part about the heirs. We decided, me and Ida Mitchell, that if ’twas all paid up front, Sarah couldn’t say no. Didn’t make any difference to John; he meant to pay it all anyway. Now that was clever of me, and I’ve known you all your life, Harry, so don’t you think I could be forgiven?”
“All my life?” I asked. “Did you deliver me? Were you here when I was born?”
His eyebrows jumped. “No, you were in too big a hurry. Your aunt Sarah delivered you.”
Aunt Sarah delivered me? The first person whose hands ever held me was Aunt Sarah?
“Harry!” Dr. Vesper sounded sharp. “Look at me, will you? Is it really all right? Because I have the power to make other arrangements.”
The words had hardly any meaning. I felt the way I did when I had the measles, when the world went oily and things melted into one another. “Yes,” I said, wanting only to make him go away.
The wagon had come down the hill, and just outside the barn door Aunt Sarah was speaking to Uncle Clayton. Her face was red; her eyes were big and hard. Truman stood a little back from them, and he looked troubled, though it was hard to tell with Truman. He looked surprised, too.
When I joined them, her silence slammed like a door, and we got to work. She kept looking at me, as if every time I put my fork into the hay I was doing something utterly and typically wrong. But I hardly felt the blow of these glances. There seemed to be a still cocoon of air around me.
We finished. She and I went inside and put supper on the table, while Uncle Clayton milked and Truman fed the pigs. We ate. No one said anything except “Pass the butter.” “Pass the salt.” We washed dishes, and Truman lingered in the rocker beside the woodbox, while the sky darkened. I folded the dish towel. “Good-night.”
Truman stirred. “Harry,” he said. His voice seemed to command attention. “Feelin’ all right? You look a little peaked.”
“Just … tired.” I took the cigar box from the shelf where it had lain all evening and climbed the stairs, undressed and washed, put on my nightgown, and sat in the rocking chair beside the window, with the cigar box on my lap. I looked off at the apricot-colored sky. The weather vane horse trotted past tinted clouds. My fingers curled around the the box lid. I felt the torn paper seal.
The house was gone, and I had seventy-eight dollars in the bank. The number made me feel poorer than when I had nothing.
There’s the tuition, I tried to remember. That’s richness. But everything seemed limited, boxed off and finished. Seventy-eight dollars, and whatever important papers might be in this cigar box, and that seemed the end of Mother.
I heard steps on the stairs. Aunt Sarah’s head appeared above the rail. “Are you all right?” she asked, without giving the slightest evidence of caring.
“Yes.”
The round head balanced there like a stone. I could hear her breathe. I looked down at my brown fingers on the lid of the cigar box.
“Don’t sit up late,” she said finally. The footsteps went down the stairs.
I flipped up the lid. The soft, dim light from the window showed the bankbook and a thin stack of papers. I turned them over, one by one.
Bills from the Academy and Fuller’s store, stamped “Paid in Full.” A bill of sale from The Estate of Ellen Gibson to Mr. Michael Callahan, for “house and two acres in West Barrett village, just east of and adjacent to Newton’s sawmill.” Bill of sale for same from William Gregg to Ellen Gibson, dated eleven years earlier.
The next piece of paper I almost missed—a small browned clipping from a newspaper. It announced the death of Walter Gibson, “the most recent of his family to perish from consumption. He was predeceased by his parents, his brother, and two of his sisters. He leaves a sister, Sarah Hall, a wife, the former Ellen Tate, and a daughter, Harriet. Those who knew Walter before sickness restricted his activity remember a kind and merry-hearted youth who showed great promise.”
Next came a piece of paper that I never looked at because when I lifted it, underneath was Mother, smiling straight at me and looking exactly like herself.
I picked up the photograph and held it nearer the window. It was mounted on stiff cardboard, an eighth of an inch thick, with “Barrett Photographic Studio” across the bottom in swirly letters. Mother wore a dress I recognized as her second best, and she looked happy and confident. By her side, so darkly dressed that I hadn’t seen him at first, stood a tall, knobby young man. Their hands were down between their two bodies, almost hidden, and wrapped around each other, into each other, as close as they could possibly get. The man’s eyes were a little staring, as if he unexpectedly found himself on the brink of exhaustion.
I turned the picture over. Her handwriting on the back was as fresh as the last note she’d written me. “Our wedding day, June 30, 1896.”
I knew now why Aunt Sarah hated Mother. I knew why she would make up things that weren’t true. But I counted on my fingers anyway. June to mid-February. Nine months. Nine …
No, I’d counted June, and June was over when they married. I had to begin with July.
Eight months then. Eight.
Babies take nine months. Every baby. Nine whole months.
So?
So what?
So it was true. Aunt Sarah had told me the truth. Mother had been pregnant when she married.
I turned the picture over, and she smiled at me again. For a moment I felt the line of love from heart to heart, and then my heart squeezed tight and cut it off.
I was in this picture. I was right there, under the bodice of the pretty dress. I looked out the window. The sky was darker. The trotting horse was black.
Does this matter?
I knew, roughly, how babies are made. “You’ll hear a lot of nonsense from other children,” Mother said, “and I want you to hear the truth from me.” Then she explained, and she laughed when I made a face. “I know, Harry! It’s part of grown-up love, and when you’re grown and in love, you’ll understand.”
“When you’re grown and in love.” Not “when you’re grown and married.”
But they did marry. They loved each other. Look at those hands.
Three years after this he died. Did she hold his hand then, as I held hers? I remembered the feel of her hand at that moment. I remembered the feel of it in my dream. I remembered the press of her wedding ring.
I don’t care about this, I thought. But I felt hollow down the center of my body, down my arms and legs. When you cut a pear in half and lift out the core with a knife—that’s what I felt like. Our past was shameful, and I had never known it. My life had been built on sand.
Were we ever really happy? I reached for my pillow and sat hugging it. “Why don’t we ever see Aunt Sarah?” I remember asking. “She doesn’t like me,” Mother had said. There was never a reason, and I never noticed that, because there couldn’t be a reason for not liking Mother. Not a real reason.
I had been happy. I had been confident. I was the daughter of the prettiest, nicest, most loving woman in town. A few sour old ladies disliked us, but that was because we were young and loved the world and dared to show it.
All along those ladies had been right about Mother.
She was good and loving.
She broke the rules. She never told me. Our life was a lie. In every scene, when I thought I knew what was going on, she knew something else.
Did she really like blackberrying?
Did she actually like reading “Evangeline” and “Hiawatha” with me?
Did she love our house? Did she love our life? Was there ever, really, any us?
I stood up, and the window glass was right in front of my face. Out there the night was soft and black. Below me they slept, Uncle Clayton, Aunt Sarah.
I didn’t want to see Aunt Sarah again.
I would walk out of t
he house right now. I would disappear.
But already I was exhausted, and where would I go? I didn’t want to see anyone, my friends even less than Aunt Sarah.
I put my hands up to the glass and remembered hurting my fingers in my skyscraper bedroom. “If you ever get to the city, Harry, you won’t feel like a rube.”
The city. A room in a real skyscraper, high and lonely. The people below me would be as small as ants, and I wouldn’t know a single one of them.
I really could go. I could sell the colt for train fare. Saddle-broken, he’d bring enough money to live on for a while.…
I crawled into bed and closed my eyes. Behind my lids it wasn’t black and soft. It was gray, like lake water on a cloudy day. Train him. Train fare. Train …
Just before morning I dreamed I was riding Mother’s sewing machine to New York City: clackety-clackety-clack.
seventeen
It doesn’t matter.
I woke up telling myself that, before I remembered what I was pushing away. I opened the cigar box and looked at their faces—hers so joyous, his weary, far-seeing. I looked at their hands.
They loved each other. It doesn’t matter when I was born.
I believed it with all my conscious might, but underneath I felt the wound. It was like the time I ripped the lace on my best dress. Mother tucked the mangled part out of sight, and people were forever complimenting me on the dress, but I never felt the same about it afterward.
I couldn’t seem to rock steadily that day. Churning took all morning, and in the afternoon I rested, as Aunt Sarah had wanted weeks ago.
Now she wouldn’t have minded if I worked myself to death. I felt the weight of her glance when I sat down after dishes. Uncle Clayton and Truman looked curious when I stayed there, while they went off to the hayfield. Aunt Sarah bunched her mouth, as if she knew exactly what was going on.
When they were gone, I went upstairs to my hot bedroom. I looked at the smiling face of my mother, the exhausted face of my father.
You did what only married people are supposed to do. That’s bad, not like killing people, but like—like keeping a dirty house. Like drinking too much. Like cheating.