“Are you like that?” she asked him. “Are all y’all men like that—so stupid as to throw yourselves away on trashy women and gamblin’ and craziness?”
“Well now . . . I can’t answer for all men,” Johnny said uncertainly, caught in a predicament he didn’t understand one bit. “I guess men are people, and people can be confused.”
“Oh, good Lord, I’m carryin’ on a ridiculous conversation with a handsome heartbreak cowboy.”
Johnny watched her shake her head. He gathered his breath and said, “Ma’am, we need to get you home.”
At that the gal covered her face and went to sobbing for all she was worth. Johnny bent and took hold of her arm and pulled her to her feet.
“Come on. I may be a man, but I’m all you got right this minute.”
She kept her head averted from him as he put an arm around her and led her back to his truck and got her up into the seat. As he slammed the door closed, she leaned forward into her hands.
Johnny went around and slipped behind the wheel. He put his hand on the key to start the truck, paused, and looked over at the gal. She was mumbling something he couldn’t understand. He had the awful thought that such hard crying could shake the baby loose. He felt he had to get her to stop crying.
“Ma’am . . . Missus Rivers.” When he shifted his rear, he felt the whiskey bottle. He took it up, and threw his hat out of the way on the dash, and slipped closer to the gal. “Here . . . take a bit of this.” He uncapped the bottle of Jim Beam and put it in front of her face, hoping to give her a whiff, but she kept her hands firmly over her face, giving forth sobs that set Johnny’s nerves twanging.
At last he put a tentative hand on her shoulder. “Ease up, gal, before you shake yourself to pieces.”
Then, somehow, he had her in his arms and was patting her back and stroking her silky hair and murmuring soothing things he really had no idea of. “Easy now, easy . . . slow up . . . here now.”
She felt so small and fragile. He tried to hold her together until she could hold herself together, and people didn’t have to know each other to do that. In his lifetime he’d held a lot of horses and a few women and even a couple of men during his army days. His mother had taught him; she’d held a lot of people in her life. She had always maintained that being held was the most important need of the human race, which was why she could make money at it.
Roy Rivers’s wife gripped Johnny’s shirt and soaked it with her tears. Her shoulders were bony and shaking beneath his arms. Gradually her warmth and fragrance came to him, too. Her hair was soft as silk, drawing his hand. He stroked her hair, again and again, and felt vaguely like he should not be feeling things he was feeling but not denying he felt what he did.
Her sobs slacked up, and he felt her become aware of her position. She pushed away.
“Please,” she said in a ragged whisper, “I’d like to go home.”
Johnny thought that a fine idea and started the truck. Unfortunately he had to go around and back past Roy Rivers’s grave. The gal looked out the window, saw the grave, and started crying again.
Totally at a loss and ever more fearful her violent sobs might tear loose the baby right there in the cab of his pickup, which was already overcrowded, Johnny pressed the accelerator and headed along at a good clip for her house. He sure hoped he would not take a wrong turn and was extremely relieved when he saw the driveway of the Rivers farm up ahead.
When he pulled in front of the house, he saw the yard was now empty of cars. By instinct, he kept going to the back door, where he’d seen the gal appear earlier that day. As he came to a stop, a tall Negro woman came out of the house.
Hopping from the truck, Johnny cast her way, “I got Missus Rivers. She’s pretty upset.”
He went around to open the passenger door. The Negro woman came pushing around him and started pulling the gal out, saying, “Come here, honey. Law, I figured you’d gone to her. Didn’t you know it wasn’t gonna do you no good? I thought you knew that,” welcoming and scolding all in a melodious, soothing tone. The two women, the younger one leaning on the older, went across the brown grass and up the cracked steps and disappeared into the house, leaving Johnny standing there in the empty yard with the sharp evening hovering over him.
He stared at the closed door a full minute, at the red print curtains showing through the glass. Then he went around and got back behind the wheel of his truck. He leaned forward to turn the key and stopped, setting back.
He didn’t know where he was going to go.
He had eight dollars, and it was too late to try to pawn something. The eight dollars would buy him either gas or a meal or a room, but not all three. And he was about to run out of whiskey, he thought, as he took up the bottle.
While he considered his predicament, dark clouds rolled overhead and wind buffeted the truck. He listened to the tree branches knocking together overhead and watched the mane and tail of the red horse blow as the horse pranced in the fast fading light. Then he happened to look down and see the china plates still sitting on the seat.
The silver fork had slipped down in the crack, prongs upward, and he had to fish it out.
Gathering the dishes and fork, he got out of the truck and went up to the back door. His knee hurt considerably, echoing the coming damp and cold. He knocked and listened to the muffled music from a radio inside while he waited. He noticed that the house trim could use a coat of paint. Thinking about the money Roy Rivers owed him, he felt a little sick.
There came the sound of heavy footsteps, and the door opened. The tall, handsome Negro woman stood there.
“May I help you?” she asked through the screen door.
“Yes, ma’am. I’d like to return these.”
She opened the screen and snatched the dishes out of his hands. “Thank you.”
“Uh . . . ma’am,” he said quickly, as she was pulling back behind the door, “I’d like to know if someone could settle up a bill Roy Rivers owed me. I have it right here in his own handwritin’.” He quickly produced it from his jacket pocket and held it up at the screen. “I would not intrude on a day like today, ma’am, but I need the money.”
The woman glanced at the paper and said, “Well, I guess you have Roy Rivers’s signature, but he is dead.” She started to shut the door, then stopped. “There’s a room and a bed in the barn, if you’d like to use it.I thank you for bringin’ Miz Etta home . . . although it would have been better if you had not taken her off.”
She shut the door.
Johnny leaned a hand on the door frame for about sixty seconds in which he considered smacking the glass out of the door.
The urge passed, and with a defeated sigh, he turned and went back to his pickup and started the engine. Raindrops hit the windshield. He began to turn the pickup to leave, thinking to go find a roadhouse and give over his last dollar to the constant tugging of demon liquor, when his gaze fell on the wide entry to the barn. As if drawn by a force, he drove the truck toward it and just as he pulled into the barn’s gapping darkness, the rain came down outside in full force. He got out of the pickup, helping his knee along. It was aching considerably now.
He smelled the familiar scent of cold dampness seeping into the wood and manure and earth, sweet smells to him. He walked over and peered into the small sleeping room. He entered and pulled the string on the single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. That the light came on surprised him. Glancing around, he saw the narrow bunk with a dirty, lumpy mattress, wooden crate beside it, old three-drawer chest against the wall, and a mass of bottles and tins atop it. Vet medicines—and among them a half-filled bottle of whiskey.
Well now . . .
He tugged off the light, returned to his truck, and spread his bedroll in the back. He knew where the dirt in his truck came from and preferred it to the dirty mattress. The whiskey eased the pain of his bad knee and lack of money considerably.
* * * *
Etta stood in her filmy white cotton gown, in the room lit only by
the hall light, and gazed through the sheer window curtains. Through lingering tears she couldn’t seem to stop and the curtains and the raindrops on the glass, she saw the cowboy standing in the barn entrance, in the glow of the pole lamp. Pushing aside the sheers, she got closer to the window. The man remained in the doorway, leaning against the side of it, smoking a cigarette.
Latrice’s footsteps sounded from the hall and entered the room. She said, “Here, honey. I’ve brought you some hot Co-Cola and a bit of cream of wheat. It’ll help you sleep.”
Etta, still looking out the window, said, “That cowboy is still out there . . . he’s in the barn.”
“Yes, I saw that. He needs a place to stay.” Latrice turned on the bedside lamp, and its reflection made seeing outside more difficult.
“Roy owed him money,” Etta said, turning from the window as Latrice pressed the hot cola at her. “I was very rude to him. I didn’t even ask his name, and he drove me to town and everything.”
“We would have been better off if he hadn’t done that,” Latrice said, her lips forming a disapproving line. “You do not need to be runnin’ around, making a spectacle of yourself. Roy Rivers managed enough of that, embarrassin’ us. You don’t need to do more.”
“Embarrassin’ us? Is that what you’re worried about?”
Latrice gazed at her. “Roy Rivers is dead. We have to go on livin’. Goin’ to talk with that woman doesn’t do nothin’ but keep stirrin’ everything up.”
“God forbid we stir anythin’ up,” Etta said, the anger coming swiftly from where it had been ready to spring. “Let it lie . . . and that’s all it’s been, big lies to each other and to ourselves.”
“Just forget it,” Latrice said. “There is nothin’ you can do about it, so it doesn’t matter now.’’
“It does matter! How I feel matters. That I’m so furious and the one person I should be screamin’ at is dead matters. That I cannot mourn my husband matters to me, whether or not it makes any sense. That I threw away all these years married to him matters. Can’t change any of it, but it damn well matters. My feelings matter!”
She was practically yelling and shaking so badly that Latrice took the cup from her hand.
“Get ahold of yourself,” Latrice said.
“Oh, I’m sure that will help a lot—to get hold of myself. Well maybe if I hadn’t been trying so hard to hold on to myself and be perfect for everyone for all these years, I might have let go of a losin’ proposition. And I suppose I do have hold of myself, because if I didn’t, I’d be out there diggin’ Roy up and kickin’ his butt all over the damn cemetery!”
Latrice stared at her with a pained expression.
“I’m sorry,” Etta said, shaking her head and turning away. She felt so sorry for her entire life.
Latrice said, “Come on, I’ll help you to bed.”
“Don’t.” Etta pulled away. “You can’t fix this for me, Latrice. You’ve always tried to fix things for me, but this time you just can’t. Please leave me. I need to be alone.”
* * * *
Outside the door, Latrice hovered, listening. She was afraid to leave Etta alone. This was the first time that Etta had ever turned away from her, and she didn’t know how to react.
Not seeing anything else to do, however, Latrice went downstairs and made a gin and tonic from Roy Rivers’s liquor cabinet, took it into the kitchen and sat in her rocker, drinking and praying to God for Etta and damning Roy Rivers to hell, and because of this having to pray for her own soul.
From the first moment she had laid eyes on Roy Rivers, Latrice had done all she could to dissuade Etta from falling into his arms. She had dug in her heels and fought, the same way a woman fights wrinkles and age spots, knowing perfectly well all the time that the war will not be won.
Oh, men had always flitted around Etta, and Latrice had had to be very vigilant. Etta had been so hungry for love and tenderhearted and pretty that she had been an accident just waiting to happen. From the time she reached fourteen, she had all the time been bringing home any male who looked hang-dogged at her. They came after her like panting puppies, and Etta fell in love with them all.
Thankfully, however, Etta had been possessed of enough sense not to fall in bed with them—and she’d had Latrice to be vigilant, too.
But then Etta had met Roy Rivers. Roy Rivers had not been the first in Etta’s heart, but he had been the first to get into her pants. That boy had been able to charm the bees right away from their honey.
Latrice had refused to go to the wedding, and when the two had returned from their honeymoon (in Las Vegas, of course, where Roy Rivers could gamble his heart out), she had stubbornly held off coming over to the Rivers house for an entire month. She knew she was going to break down and go eventually, and she even began to haul home boxes in preparation for packing the things in the little white cracker box of a cottage she and Etta had shared, just the two of them since Etta’s mother had died and her daddy had run off. But she was holding out until Etta summoned her, which she knew Etta would do sooner or later.
When Etta had called, it had been in a distressed state, crying because she had miscarried the child she had held in her womb even as she married. Upon hearing that news, and the total despair in Etta’s voice, Latrice had summoned her cousin Freddy the cabdriver and headed for the Rivers farm. Passing by a grocery, she’d had Freddy stop so that she could shop for supper that evening. She figured she might as well carve her place into the situation immediately. Besides, she knew good and well Etta had not had a decent meal since her wedding day, because Etta was a poor cook.
In the Rivers’s big shiny kitchen (which she instantly coveted but would not admit) with Etta safe and secure in the rocking chair, Latrice whipped up the meal—lean ham slices and collards and new potatoes and cornbread, with sweetened peaches and milk for desert.
Watching him ladle big scoops of butter onto his bread and insist on cream for his peaches, even in the face of his wife who could barely eat, Latrice saw the truth of it all in his florid face and smooth grin—Roy Rivers wanted Etta, and he intended to have her in the way of a grasping man who has always gone after and gotten his exact desire and will. Latrice was ashamed that she had failed in her duty to protect Etta and educate her against such men as this.
Over after-supper coffee, Roy Rivers said to her, “You know you have to come here to live, Latrice.” He used his smoothest voice and smile as he struck a match to light up a cigar. “I’ll give you your own room and an allowance.”
“I want my own bathroom, too,” she said, figuring she might as well make the best of this situation.
“I’ll have it built,” he said.
Later he turned it into a brag, getting a kick out of telling people, “My wife came with her own nanny.”
Roy Rivers had tried to charm Latrice, and when that hadn’t worked, he had tried to buy her goodwill with perfume, a new Westinghouse clothes washer and dryer, and a radio powerful enough to pick up, on good nights, Chicago to the north and the Border to the south, just for her, because he knew that in alienating her he ran the risk of displeasing Etta, and also because Roy Rivers really had trouble with a person not liking him.
In his way, Latrice had to concede, he had been as needy as Etta. She supposed she at times had felt sorry for him, but that was before he had died and left them in such a bind.
Latrice came awake to discover that morning was approaching and that she had slept all night in her rocker. She was stiff as a starched sheet and highly annoyed because sleeping in a chair seemed something that old people did, and she was not old—only forty-one.
After lighting the oven to take the chill off the kitchen, she plugged in the percolator out on the back porch. Glancing at the barn, she saw the cowboy’s pickup still showing in the entrance. She gazed at it for a long minute. She had an uneasy feeling about the cowboy. It seemed odd the way Roy died and then the cowboy had appeared. Seemed a portent of some kind. One thing Latrice knew, nothing in life wa
s coincidence.
While the coffee perked, she went into the tiny bathroom built off her bedroom, bathed, and dressed in a long-sleeved navy-blue shirtwaist and arranged her hair in an artful wave above her forehead, securing the rest in a roll at the back of her neck. Strands of gray had begun to show in her glossy dark hair at her temples. High cheekbones, a family trait, gave her face an ageless quality. Her mother had been handsome even as she died at thirty-eight from cancer eating her away. Latrice knew herself to be an attractive woman. Many a man had told her so and had wanted her. It was her choice not to have any of them. Having been sorely disappointed by the death of her fiancé, she guarded her heart and her freedom. Being tied to Etta was enough.
Latrice had always thought when Etta was well settled, she might then look around and chose a man. But that time had certainly not come with Roy Rivers. And the years got away.
She went out onto the porch to pour her cup of coffee.
The fresh morning air was damp and crisp. There came the sound of Obie Lee’s old pickup truck chugging down the lane from his house through the woods, backfiring like it always did. Obie Lee, a widower of some six years, worked forty acres of the Rivers land on shares and worked around the farm for cash money.
Latrice stood there and watched the battered truck stop at the barn. Obie, all six and half feet of him, unfolded himself from behind the wheel, flashed her a bright grin, and started straight for her. Obie Lee was in love with her.
“Mornin’, Miss Latrice . . . mighty fine day, ain’t it.” His lazy tone of voice could annoy Latrice no end.
“There’s not enough of it to tell yet,” she replied.
“Guess I’m anticipatin’,” he said. “I brought my thermos and thought I might fill it—your coffee bein’ so much better than mine.” He gazed up at her from the ground, his eyes like a red-bone pup’s, all warm and friendly and hopeful.
If Wishes Were Horses Page 6