What Love Sees

by Susan Vreeland

  She dressed and made her way out to the kitchen where voices sounded cheerful. “About time you got up,” Forrest teased.

  “Is it late?”

  “Not for a city girl, I suppose. Just that I’ve been waiting, doing a tap dance here in the kitchen.” His voice dropped. “I didn’t sleep much.”

  Jean tried to think of a way to tease him back—there hadn’t been many hours left to sleep—but she stopped herself. She didn’t know who else was nearby.

  “Now that you and I are going to be friends,” he said, “you oughta see what I do all day, and the first thing I do is milk the cows. In fact, I’m late now. You want to come along? I got something special to show you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just you wait. First, what do you have on your feet?”

  “Shoes.”

  “It rained some last night so that pasture’s mighty wet and it’ll come near to your waist, you’re such a little thing. We got to get you some boots. Come on out to the barn.”

  Forrest led, then Chiang, then Jean. As Forrest walked, he clapped his hands sharply. Eventually it created a barely perceptible echo. “We’re here.” He turned left abruptly and Chiang followed. Clever, he was, to figure that out. Jean wondered if she would have ever thought of that as a way to guide herself. The barn door creaked as Forrest swung it open. Inside, the smell of damp hay and manure engulfed her. Its freshness made it not at all unpleasant. A cat meowed. Forrest fumbled around for a while and found some rope and a pair of black rubber waders.

  “Where are you?”

  “Over here.”

  “Do you think these’ll fit?”

  She reached out and found the heavy boots. “They’re huge.”

  “Well, how abut putting them over your shoes?” He squatted down next to her and held one boot while she tugged at the other. She lost her balance and half fell, half leaned against him. Her arm went to his shoulder to catch herself. It was firm and muscular beneath his flannel shirt.

  “Steady, girl,” he said.

  “Sounds like you’re talking to a horse.”

  “Maybe a filly. Will they work?”

  “Yes, I guess so.” It must look foolish, she thought, because above the boots she wore a dress. Then she realized it didn’t matter.

  Forrest headed toward the corral. Chiang and Jean followed.

  “How do you know where you are?”

  “The rise of the ground. Now, Jeanie, you may have Chiang and she’s a seeing eye dog. But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I’ve got a seeing eye bull.”

  “There’s no such thing.”

  “Well, the cows are out in the pasture. Eight of them. They could be anywhere in the ten acres. How do you suppose I’m going to find them if they don’t come back for milking?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I let my seeing eye bull spot them for me. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, ya know.”

  Jean heard muffled snorting as they moved toward the corral. “I don’t want to go in there.”

  “You don’t have to. Put your hand here on the fence so’s I know where you are. There’s a gate here just to your left, but don’t come in. I go in right here and clap a rope around Victor Mature here. That’s what I call the moose. Then he leads me out to the pasture to find the ladies.”

  Jean held onto the corral rail with one hand, to Chiang’s harness with the other. She rubbed her hand along the weathered top rail. It felt satiny except where it was pocked by knots. The wood was sinewy, like Forrest’s arm was when she stroked it the night before. A breeze made her bare arms tingle. She leaned to the left side and a little forward, her stay-alert-to-perceive-everything stance. She could hardly believe what Forrest was doing. And he was so sure about it. The snorting came again, forceful and low. Forrest announced his presence to the bull just inside the gate. The bull grunted and shuffled a little in response.

  “Yeah, big boy. Now I know where you are.” Jean heard them scuffle and heard a rope swish. She held her breath. “Hey, hey. Got him, slick as a whistle.” Jean heard them come toward her and a little to the left. She slid up closer to the rail in front of her. “He’s on his way, Jeanie. Will Chiang follow?”

  “I hope so. She’s never followed a bull before.” Jean moved away from the fence and turned in the direction she heard Forrest. “Forward,” she said to Chiang, forcefully, she thought, and the four of them were off, rumbling out across the pasture. The long grass brushed wet against her knees above the big boots and the ground swelled beneath her feet like ocean billows. She felt just on the edge of danger. What was she thinking of, wandering out in the middle of a pasture with a bull and cows and who knows what else? Still, her awe at what this man could do, what he was in fact doing, every day of his life, was enough to take her out with him to that pasture and to whatever may happen there. She was drawn to him just as if another rope attached to him were pulling her along. Forrest whistled so she could know where he was and sometimes his footsteps splattered in a puddle. That helped her to follow. Air blew up her skirt and felt cool where the wet grass had left moisture. It sent a quick shiver up her back.

  “Wet grass smells sweeter than dry grass, or is that my imagination?” she asked.

  “No. You’re right. Cleaner, too.”

  “You love it here, don’t you?”

  “You betcha. It’s home. Peaceful even if the rest of the world isn’t.”

  “Are you sorry you’re not in the war?”

  “No. No one wants to go to war. But I suppose I’d rather go to war than not see, if that was the choice.” They walked a while in silence. “I guess I’m fighting my own battles.”

  There it was again, his fearless sharing. She could grow to love that. Maybe that’s what had been missing before. Jean stepped in a gushy spot and the mud sucked at her boot as she lifted her heel. It sounded funny and broke the seriousness of the moment. “How do you know he’s leading us to the cows?” she asked.

  “Simple. Old Victor Mature, he’s always greedy, and where the cows are feeding, he figures they’re eating something good and he wants it too. When he stops and I hear the cows bawling because we’re close, I sling this other rope around in the air and whoop and holler, and they head for the barn. Slow down. The big guy just stopped. Stand behind me, Jean.”

  She did as she was told, well behind him. The cows did start to bawl, just as he said. He whooped a wild western sound and his rope cut the quiet morning air. Just like in movies and radio shows, she thought.

  “They’re moving, Jean. We’ve got to hightail it back.”

  “How do you know all of them are moving?”

  “Oh, they want to get milked as much as I want to milk them. Sometimes I hardly need to go out to fetch them.”

  “Why do you call the bull Victor Mature?” She wanted to keep him talking in order to know where he was.

  “Because of his broad shoulders. He’s heavily stacked and low slung to the ground. And he goes after the ladies.”

  “Do you do this twice a day?”

  “Sure do. Dandy, huh? There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” he said again. She thought the old saying must be his personal proverb, his battle cry against a world suddenly grown strange. She began to realize that if the need came for him to skin a cat, he’d surely find a way to do it.

  The sounds changed as they approached the barn doorway. The cows jostled into position in the darker coolness. She heard a cat again. Forrest spoke to the cows in a soft voice as he moved around the barn. Then he asked, “Are you in here, Jeanie?”

  “No,” she said from the doorway.

  “Well, you got to come in to see what I’m doing. Stand right here next to this stall.”

  “Forward,” she told Chiang. To see what he was doing? He used language just as if they could both see. Most other people were far too sensitive about using the word “see” around her.

  “Stay right there so I know where you are.”

  “Oh, I won’t mo
ve an inch. I’m not too sure about this milking business.” She heard Forrest get a couple of metal pails. “Aren’t you afraid one will kick you?”

  “No, not if I stand in the right place.”

  The cat meowed.

  “She wants some milk.”

  “She knows she’ll get it, too. She always sits behind and about four feet to the left of the cow I’m milking.” The rhythmic squirt, squirt, squirt pinged into the pail. “When she sets up a racket I can hardly stand, I aim a faucet of milk just where she is.” The cat begged some more. “Just like this.”

  “Do you think she got it?”

  “Sure she did. Otherwise she’d still be crying. She’s busy licking it off her face and chest. When she’s ready for some more we’ll hear her again.”

  The milk changed sounds, becoming more muffled as the bucket was filling. Jean heard a tail swish. Forrest moved to another cow. “Do you want to have a go at it?”

  “Milking? Oh, no. I’ll just let you.” She smiled at the sounds and breathed the musty barn odors and cow smells. It was pleasant in there in the coolness with the cat crying and the milk squirting rhythmically and Forrest at work.

  “Today I have to work across the valley. We have five acres in alfalfa and we just hired hands to cut it, but I’ve got to get it loaded. I have a driver and helper, and we take over an empty truck and bring it back loaded. You want to come? We have to ride on top of the hay on the way home.”

  “Of course I do.”

  It was so new and free and unlimited, this western life. Bouncing along on top of the loose hay at the end of the day, one hand holding Chiang’s leash, the other holding Forrest’s hand, she felt supremely happy. You’ve got to live a little, she remembered Sally Anne saying, but she doubted if this was quite what Sally Anne had meant. She talked louder than usual, spilling her words out to the breeze and Forrest. The truck jolted but she didn’t brace herself so she was jounced against his chest. One bump was so big she instinctively grabbed hold of his arm. She let her hand linger there. The muscles of his forearm felt ropey and his hair tickled her palm. The hay smelled fresh and pungent, surrounding her with sensations of ranch, work, growing, earth. Life.

  Chapter Fifteen

  All too soon Dody came to pick her up, and Jean and Forrest had to say goodbye. The next day Forrest came to dinner at Dody’s. “I convinced Alice to drive me,” he said smugly. Forrest and Jean said goodbye again. Two days later he came again. “Connecticut’s on the other side of the world, Jeanie. We got to have a big goodbye.”

  Dody was thorough. She invited Forrest one last time and then left them alone, protesting she had to make a phone call. Each goodbye was greater than the last.

  Jean felt like she was drifting in a dream all the way home. It had been more wonderful than she had dared to hope. Forrest wasn’t a pitiful victim needing encouragement like Dody had said, but a proud, vital, active outdoorsman. Although Jean had accused Dody lightheartedly of tricking her just to get her to visit, Dody protested that she only thought Jean could stand a little adventure in her life. On the way home as the significance of her visit settled, she began to recognize that a deeper adventure might have just begun.

  Hickory Hill was dull by comparison. It was back to the piano with Mother. Jean resumed her lessons at the Girls’ Club once a week. The walk downtown with Chiang was tame now compared to an uncharted pasture.

  Icy Eastman was married to an army colonel. Jean played the wedding march. Jean was bridesmaid in Sally Anne’s wedding. She was in Louise Barnes’ wedding. She was in Tready’s sister’s wedding. Tready went west to marry an officer. The men went to war. It was 1942. Some of the women, wives now, still lived with parents. There were plenty of women in Bristol who wanted company. Jean was invited to their homes. They talked of letters from abroad sprinkled with foreign phrases or military jargon. The women took airplane identification classes. They talked of campaigns and marches, of cities all over the world and tiny islands in the Pacific. Jean thought of a pasture.

  Miss Weaver closed Andrebrook. She worked for the government as a German translator. Everyone did his bit for the war effort. Jean folded bandages at the Red Cross. Only women came to Hickory Hill to swim that summer. Whenever they wanted a Coke, they put some coins in the Red Cross box on the verandah, and once a week, Jean and Chiang took the money downtown when she went to do bandages.

  She haunted the mailbox. Since Forrest didn’t have a Brailler, she had Mother read his badly typed letters. They told of milking cows, of trading stock in order to increase his herd, of hoedowns in the nearby mountain town of Julian. Once he wrote, “Victor Mature got some kind of playful notion in his head and led me astray today. Didn’t know where I was. I felt like kicking the old moose in the slats, but I wasn’t quite sure where they were.” She shared that letter with Icy.

  Mother began to know Forrest, too. She laughed at his homespun language and what he called P.M. humor, pre-marital jokes, “sanitized for your benefit, Mrs. Treadway,” he wrote once. His letters were silly, Jean knew, but that didn’t matter. In one letter he announced, “I wrote a book today. I’m going to call it Mama’s Awful Coffee, or Grounds for Divorce.” In the next letter he said, “I wrote another book today. This one’s called The Missing Flowers in the White House Rose Garden, or Have You Seen Eleanor’s Bloomers?”

  Jean timed her day’s activities around the mail delivery. Once she grabbed the mail and thrust the letters into Mother’s hand just as she was ready to leave for the Red Cross. There was another letter from Forrest. Mother read, “This week I wrote a mystery story. It’s called The Mystery of the Missing Magician: A Houdini Who Dunnit.” Mother was exasperated. “Honestly, Jean. Do you think the war effort and the Red Cross ought to wait for this?” She rushed out the door. Jean only smiled.

  Their letters couldn’t be very personal. Forrest’s mother read Jean’s to him. Jean wondered what they’d be writing if their mothers weren’t reading the letters. She longed for a little more privacy. He could at least learn to read Braille better, she thought, so she sat down at her Brailler to give him practice.

  “Dear Forrest, Here’s a funny story I read when I was little,” she punched out. “A guy and a girl got married. The lady had a black ribbon around her neck. On the honeymoon she kept it on all night. ‘What’s it for?’ asked the man.

  “‘I’ll tell you after a year.’ All year the man wondered because she never took it off.”

  The story dragged on and on, the woman not telling him until they were married thirty years. Jean punched out the letters feverishly, feeling a little giddy inside. It took two pages. She hoped he hadn’t heard the story before so he’d keep going until the end, just for practice.

  “On their thirtieth anniversary he asked again. ‘Okay, you promised. Why do you wear that black ribbon?’

  “‘I’ll show you.’ She took it off and her head fell off.”

  With that, Jean ended the letter. It was a dumb joke, but still a little giggle escaped when she sealed the envelope. She pictured him picking out the pinpricks line by laborious line.

  Mother read Forrest’s next letter. “What the devil were you thinking of sending me a Braille letter? It took me a day and a half to figure the thing out. All for that crummy punch line.”

  After that she Brailled her letters more frequently. Christmas came and went. On New Year’s Eve, there was another Ares and Ain’ts party downstairs. Upstairs in her room Jean sat down at her Brailler again. He had asked about her other boyfriends. What could she possibly say? There weren’t any.

  “Donald was my first boyfriend,” she wrote. “He lived on the corner and went to Federal Hill Grammar School with me. We used to climb trees and play Truth, Dare and Consequences. On lucky days the consequences consisted of a scared little peck on the cheek that lasted half a second. When I was eleven, Donald climbed the tree outside my bathroom window and peeked in. Father caught him. There was a big row. I can’t remember what Father said. I was in a panic
for what might happen to Don. A few years ago Father lent him money to go to Middlebury College for pre-med. He’s a laboratory technician now. He paid Father back and married a woman with a moustache and a low voice. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  She loved to play the innocent.

  “When can you come out again?” Forrest wrote back.

  Jean was bolder in her Braille letters than in her typed ones. She punched out, “If I knew that there might be some future for us, it would be easier to get Mother to make a trip with me.”

  He wrote back immediately. “There is. There is a future. You know it as well as I do.”

  In the summer of 1943, Jean and Mother booked a Pullman to Los Angeles.

  Forrest began a massive cleanup campaign at Rancho de Los Pimientos. He repaired the barn door. He cleaned Hermit House. He cleaned the main cabin. He scrubbed the kitchen walls so vigorously that when Alice came in she screamed, “Forrest, stop! You’re scraping off the paint.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes, just stop scrubbing and rinse it off. Here. Move out of the way so I can get to the icebox.”

  “Don’t call it an ice box in front of Mrs. Treadway. It’s a refrigerator.”

  “Forrest, she’s not the Queen of England,” said Alice. “Okay.” Her voice softened. “I promise to remember.”

  Mother Holly was caught up in the frenzy of preparations too. She borrowed an oil stove for the room that the aristocratic eastern lady and her daughter would sleep in. Forrest helped move it in. She borrowed two matching bedspreads, two bedside tables, two lamps.