What Love Sees

by Susan Vreeland

  On the phone Forrest and Dody had stretched the horseback ride to a visit of three days. Jean hadn’t counted on that, but she didn’t protest. Miss Weaver’s famous “life is to be lived” doctrine made her feel ready for whatever the experience would give her. “I don’t know what you got me into,” she said, more in sport than in trepidation. “What’s it like out here?”

  “Beautiful. There’s manzanita all over. That’s a bush with crooked, woody branches. It has a smooth reddish bark that sometimes peels off. It grows in dry places. Ramona is awfully hot in the summer. There’s live oak, too, all over these hillsides, and avocado and citrus trees.”

  “Live oak? As opposed to dead oak?”

  “No. It’s just a different variety than in New England.”

  “What kind of a town is Ramona?”

  “Tired and kind of ramshackle. The main street is probably only six or eight blocks long. It’s picturesque because it’s surrounded on all sides by mountains, and sometimes people ride into town on horses, but nothing ever happens in Ramona.”

  “Everybody probably knows everybody else’s business.”

  “When Forrest lost his sight, it was the subject of gossip all over town. People said things like, ‘What a shame about the young Holly boy.’ ‘He’s a proud one, you know. That’s what caused it in the first place, going out for a pass that wasn’t his.’ That was a couple of years ago, before I met him.”

  “You sure know a lot about him suddenly. Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”

  “You didn’t seem interested.” Jean felt the tease behind the words. Dody waited a minute, then continued. “Apparently the Hollys are well known because they’re a little better off than most Ramona people, and Mrs. Holly has done some kindly things for the Indians. They call her Lady Mother.”

  “Frilly name.”

  “Or Mother Holly.”

  “Who told you all this?”

  “Mom.”

  For a moment Jean forgot to keep herself braced. They went around a sharp turn and she swung over toward the door. The road crossed a dry creek, not on a bridge but right on the creek bed. It bounced the car and Jean held her hands out on the seat on each side of her. Then Dody shifted down to climb a hill. At the top she turned in at a long driveway.

  “Are we there?”

  “Yes. It’s a wooden frame house with a screened porch, kind of lonesome. Pepper trees, cactus garden, rail fence. Forrest’s waiting outside.” Dody stopped the engine and got out. “What do you do, stand out here all day waiting for cars to stop?”

  “It’s high time you two showed up. Hi ya, Jean.”

  “Hi.”

  “It’s farther out here than I remembered,” said Dody.

  “Bring Jean on in so she won’t get hung up in the cactus. The cholla can jump right out and get you. Are your bags in the trunk?”

  “Yes.” Jean got out and let Chiang out and stood by the car door. “Cactus? Are we in the desert?”

  “No, but it’s pretty dry here in summer, though you couldn’t tell that now, and cactus is easier than a lawn.” Dody opened the trunk and Forrest felt for her suitcase and lifted it out. “Most of these we brought in. Barrel cactus, prickly pear, ocotillo, century plant and yucca, and they all have thorns sharp enough to skewer a bull’s catook, so don’t make any wild moves.”

  Jean laughed. His folksy speech fascinated her. She wanted to remember that one to tell Icy.

  Right away Jean met Forrest’s mother. “There’s a row of field stones around the cactus so if you feel that, Jean, don’t go any farther,” she explained. That was considerate, Jean thought. Mrs. Holly’s voice sounded softly lyrical. The air smelled dusty and it was warmer than when they were crossing the mountains. Inside the house Alice greeted her but Jean hardly had time to say three sentences before both women disappeared. All too soon Dody was ready to leave too. Jean rehearsed her phone number in case—in case of anything. Three days was a long time. There she was, in a strange house, with a near stranger 3000 miles from home. She knew it was a set-up with everybody suddenly gone, but she went along with it. It was the most adventure she’d had since Europe with Miss Weaver.

  With his big rough hand making her arm tingle, Forrest guided her to a chair in the living room—she presumed it was the living room—and said, “Now, tell me all about yourself.”

  What a question, right off. Either there was nothing shy about Forrest or he had no class. She didn’t know how to answer.

  He filled in the awkward silence. “Just why aren’t you so smart? In your letter you said you were a happy family but not so smart.”

  Suddenly she wished she hadn’t written that. “Oh, I don’t know what I meant. I guess I thought nothing I could say would be very interesting to you. I guess I meant we were plain.”

  “How do you mean plain?”

  “Well, we don’t ride horses and we don’t have cows and we don’t live on a ranch. We just live in a house and Father goes to work and we just live.”

  “Sounds pretty breezy.”

  His words rolled out liquid and smooth and warm. Because he kept the questions coming, she told him about Hickory Hill and school and Miss Weaver’s trip and music. At her feet, Chiang breathed deeply and shifted positions. Jean patted her on the neck and told Forrest all about her. “She’s a wonderful animal, and a good friend. She’s so intelligent and well-trained that people want to come up and pet her. I have to try to sense when that’s happening and ask people not to.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s got to be responsive and responsible only to me and not be distracted. The instructors were very firm about that. But I can pet her and love her when she’s not working.”

  Forrest wanted to know how she managed her, so she explained all the commands. When talking got easier, she told of the stumbling closeness between the students at The Seeing Eye and of the ache of saying goodbye, of Lee and how he expected his students to speak up for themselves and live in the real world. Forrest murmured encouragement that made her think he understood. Feeling naïve but going ahead anyway, she told him of Jimmy. She held back nothing. The last part was an effort, but it broke the ice. What did she have to lose?

  When she finished, he didn’t say anything, but groped for her hand, got her knee instead and then drew back. They both laughed at their nervousness.

  “I want to show you around before dinner,” he said. “This house started out as just one main room and a kitchen and bathroom, so we called it the cabin then. We still do even though it’s bigger now. There’s a screened porch you came through to get in.” He stood up. “Follow me.” They got up. Chiang followed Forrest and Jean followed Chiang, but when they got outside Forrest took Jean’s hand. It wasn’t necessary, she had Chiang, but it felt comfortable. The grasp of his big hand was firm on hers, swallowing it in tender roughness. Jean changed Chiang from the harness to the leash, which meant “off duty.”

  “It’s warm even though it’s February. I can’t believe it.”

  “It gets plenty cold sometimes, and it still may rain tonight. That’ll plaster down the dust some. When we were kids, we used to sleep in the screened porch. It was cool in summer, but in winter we’d heat stones about the size of cantaloupes on the oil burner in the living room, wrap them in newspaper and put them in our beds. They kept us dandy warm. But now I have my own little place out here in back. It’s a separate room detached from the house. I call it Hermit House. Here it is.”

  He was careful to scrape his feet at the threshold. That surprised her. It made him seem like a gentleman even though so many things about him were rough. She scraped her feet, too. Inside, he pointed out where things were and guided her hands to feel his table with typewriter and radio, his bed, his dresser. “When I had a Hereford steer slaughtered, I took the hide to an old man, about ninety years old, and he tanned it. Feel it here on the floor, Jean. It’s a beauty. I do my push-ups on it.”

  He led her outside again. They made a circle arou
nd the house. The circle seemed small to Jean. Her nostrils flared at the strong scent of horse manure made oppressive by the heat. It didn’t smell bad, actually, just earthy. “I smell horses.”

  “Yup. In the back we have two barns, one for horses and one for cows. I’ll take you there tomorrow. Over here on this side of the cabin under the pepper trees are some cages. My father raised peafowl—you know, peacocks and hens—and so we still do. You’ll probably hear them before too long.”

  “I hear them now.”

  “I don’t mean them just walking around pecking. I mean screeching. In mating season they put up an awful racket. Let’s go in now. I smell dinner.”

  The family supper was in the living room, the only other choice besides the kitchen. Forrest introduced his sister Helen and her husband Don. They lived in a tiny house on an adjacent two-acre plot behind the cabin. In a hubbub of commotion and teasing, they all got situated and settled down to say grace together. Jean hadn’t said grace for years. Quaint, she thought, and bowed her head. Just after the “amen,” Don’s voice boomed out, “Forrest, get your hand out of the muffins.” The command came like a benediction, without a pause.

  “Now, Don, you know I’m going to have to get you back for showing me up as some no ’count in front of Jean here.”

  The teasing surprised her. So different from Hickory Hill. It continued all through dinner. “All this talk makes me thirsty,” Forrest said.

  “It’s further right, Forrest.” Alice’s voice was high and tinny.

  “Alice, you been drinking my water? If you wanted to share, all you needed to do what to ask. After all, what are brothers for?”

  “Oh, Jean, he always does this,” Alice said, “misunderstanding on purpose just to make a dumb joke.”

  A few minutes after they started eating there was a hideous, whining scream. “Help, help,” it seemed to say. It came from the front of the house. Everybody kept eating and talking right through it.

  “What’s that terrible scream?” Jean interrupted.

  “Oh, it’s just the Indian, Earl Duran, across the highway. Going after his wife again,” Don said.

  “Sounds like she’s just about to be murdered,” Forrest said.

  Everybody laughed. The screeching continued.

  “Tell me,” Jean insisted.

  “It’s just the peacocks, dear. Don’t be alarmed.” Mother Holly’s voice was calming. “Some truck drivers know we have peacocks here, and when they go by on the highway they think it’s funny to honk their horn and that sets them off.”

  “You shouldn’t believe everything they say,” Alice explained. “Earl doesn’t even have a wife.”

  “But does an Indian really live across the road?”

  “Oh, yes, three of them.”

  Jean felt like she was at the edge of some frontier a world away from Connecticut, or back in time.

  After dinner Forrest and Don put on a show of imitating people’s walks, apparently a favorite pastime, for they swung into action naturally, describing in exaggerated language what they were doing. The subjects were all local people, women they’d all known for years. One was a slink. Another an old maid teacher who took tiny mincing steps and kept her finger to her mouth. One girl made her bosoms bounce. “That’s Gloria. How could I forget her?” Forrest said. Another heaved her hips back and forth so widely she almost tipped over. Jean laughed with the others, her imagination running wild. It was free swinging western humor, not malicious but far from the contained tinkling laughter in the living room at Hickory Hill. But the strange thing was that it was visual. Forrest took part just as if he could see. And Dody had wanted her to write him because she thought he was having trouble?

  Don and Helen left soon after dinner and Mother Holly and Alice went to bed early. Alone again. Staged. The setup made their being there seem so innocent, so wholly planned by a force apart from them that she felt comfortable accepting the direction events were moving.

  She heard some scraping across the room and then a couple of thuds and the crackle of the fire. It dawned on her what was happening but her surprise made the words come anyway. “What in the world are you doing?”

  “Putting another log on the fire.”

  “How?” she blurted. Immediately, she felt foolish.

  “Not very well. But I’ve got a poker here and some big tongs. I just have to poke around to find out what’s there.” He struggled for a while, and she heard a few thumps as he shifted the logs on the grate and they fell down. “I can tell by the crackling when I get it right. Sometimes.”

  There were some things she would never tackle, things that probably shouldn’t be tackled. But she also knew the frustration of being told “you can’t” or “you shouldn’t.” Even worse than that was disbelief or distrust expressed by silence. One thing was sure. This man had spirit. Where was his despair, the crashing end Dody had said he thought his life had come to?

  “Can you feel the heat?”

  “Yes.” A wave of not only of heat but of feeling engulfed her. Something inside her—was that her heart?—brightened and felt a warmth from within, as an ember below a grate burns from within, making itself luminous, pulsing intermittently with radiance.

  She didn’t want him to interpret her silence as disapproval. She had to say something. “What’s this room look like?”

  “Oh, it’s a dandy.” A couple more thuds, then the crackling increased and she heard the scrape made by pulling the screen closed. “The fireplace is stone with a cougar skin hanging above it. When we were kids, we gathered the stones to make it. There are some crevices between the rocks and one night last winter Alice thought she saw a pair of eyes in a crevice about a foot above the hearth. I thought she was crazy, but everybody looked and, sure enough, a close-set pair of eyes was looking back. A snake, probably from under the house, had slithered through some crack in the cemented pile of rocks and found a tunnel which opened right into the living room. I don’t know which was more terrified, the snake or Alice. It was obvious the snake couldn’t retrace his path and crawl back out, but we didn’t want him coming out into the living room.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Only one thing we could do. Mix up some mortar and pack the varmint in. We felt kinda sorry for him because he didn’t mean any harm, but from the looks of his head, he might have been a rattler. I guess his skeleton is still lying there in his tunnel tomb.”

  Jean gulped. Varmint. That was another one she’d have to tell Icy. But she couldn’t imagine telling Tready all this. “What else is in this room?”

  “Oh, there’s a piano. You can play it if you like.”

  “Who plays it here?”

  “Alice. She rides all over the valley on Pronto to give music lessons in people’s homes. There are some Indian baskets and ollas, they’re water jugs, and an Indian rug in front of the fireplace. There’s a pair of elk horns on the wall behind you, so don’t get wild and decide to jump up. There’s a statue of Lincoln to the left of the fireplace and bookshelves all over. We probably have fifteen years of National Geographics.

  A log suddenly thudded onto the grate and Forrest poked and pushed at it some more, unleashing a battery of crackles. Then he came over to sit with her. Her heart sped. He smelled like ashes and the outdoors. “We have two sofas in this room. One’s an old leather sofa. The newer one has a big buffalo robe draped over it.” He began to talk slower, as if he wanted her to understand more than what he was saying. “The leather sofa is the fighting sofa, for roughhousing when we were kids. The new one is called the sitting sofa. It’s for kissing.”

  Jean’s hand went out to feel what she was sitting on. It felt furry. He put his arm around her shoulder. His voice dropped to a whisper. “This is the sitting sofa.”

  Slowly, his hand traced a path over her shoulder to her neck. It wasn’t timid even though it moved with deliberate slowness. She held her breath, suspended in expectancy. His hand moved up her neck and held her head. His weight next to her o
n the sofa made the cushion dip down so that she was leaning toward him. He drew her head closer and his lips found hers.

  She relaxed into his arms and, unguardedly, into his world for perhaps a moment. That was all. Then she drew herself back into her own, imperceptibly, though. She didn’t actually move away. Who was he to assume she wanted to kiss him just because they were thrust together and they were both blind? That’s too simple. His mouth was gentle, constant, moving over her face, her neck. But false aloofness was stupid, too. She felt part of her move toward him again, toward this man who built fires and rode horses and talked funny. And had sure hands.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A rooster crowed. From cloudy sleep, she woke but did not move, out of fear of spoiling those first dewy thoughts and the realization of where she was. Embers of the night before still glowed in her mind and made her smile into the blanket she drew up around her face. She often recounted to herself special moments. At honest times she recognized the pure indulgence of experiencing them again—her moments of passionate living were so few. And this morning she indulged herself. Maybe joy was always more penetrating after despair.

  She bent her knees and pulled her nightgown down and tucked it under her feet. She thought how she and Forrest had talked late into the night. He had listened so earnestly. He’d never known another person who couldn’t see. She could tell he wanted to know about her life and her adjustment. He asked a thousand questions about Chiang, yet he hadn’t talked of his own blindness at all, never even used the word “blind,” as if it were a subject abhorrent to him. Their similarity drew them to each other as surely as he had drawn her face to his. No one had ever shown such intense interest in all the details of her life, not even Jimmy.

  So Forrest was a pole vaulter. Funny. So was Jimmy. Forrest suffered bouts of asthma. So did Jimmy. Forrest said he wasn’t “too shabby” on the dance floor. Neither was Jimmy. But that’s where the similarities ceased.

  Jimmy was an urbanite. Forrest, far from one. He wore cowboy boots. His c.b.’s, he called them, “complete with manure to prove they’re used.” Jimmy was pretty distant and independent from his family and rarely talked of them. Forrest was unusually close to his, and needed them. But the big difference was that Forrest was a westerner, had hauled hay, milked cows, shoed horses. He did things outdoors, and although he might do them differently now that he couldn’t see, he was still doing them. She knew how to value that. But what was she doing comparing? Leave Jimmy out of it! She threw off the blankets and got up.