So it’s Christmas night, and he is alone with the woman that he loves, Pamela, here in her robe beside him at the tree, with a little smile on her face, as if they’re children having a party of their own. She says, “Wasn’t that awful, about that necklace?”
He laughs, wishing for a drink. “It was right bad.”
“I do hope she finds it, though.” She reaches out and touches a hollow glass globe. Santa and his reindeer ride across it, in white glitter. Pamela’s red fingernails sparkle.
He has lost his train of thought. They were talking about a necklace. He has to bring in the stepladder. If he forgets, Philip will cover for him, struggling to fold the ladder and stow it in the shed before anybody else is up.
“What are you thinking about?” asks Pamela.
“Nothing much. Don’t get cold down here,” he says and could kick himself, for now she’ll go away.
But she stays where she is, examining the decorations. “I like the real old ones the best,” she says.
He points out a tin star. “This one’s mine. Dad gave me that, when I was a child.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“I hated that nickname they used to call me. Dovey. Terrible thing to call a boy.”
Many women would laugh, but Pamela doesn’t. “You outgrew it, though.”
“Sometimes Mother still calls me that.”
He knows nothing about women, has dated several but they drop him quickly. He’s been to a few whores, white and black. He can’t remember the last time he saw Pamela, probably the Fourth of July. She and Barrett live in Williamsburg, a long drive away. Oh, not that long. They just don’t visit often. Who could blame Barrett for wanting to keep Pamela to himself?
“You picked out this tree, didn’t you?” Pamela asks. “How did you choose it?”
Nobody else would think to ask him that. Before he can answer, Pamela clears her throat and says, “I’m going to have a baby.”
“Oh. That’s wonderful,” he says, too fast. And he feels shocked and breathless, the way he did when he was kicked by a horse, back when he was twelve.
He and all his brothers fought in the war, despite flat feet and bad vision. Vernon is deaf in one ear. Their mother wanted to keep Dudley safe. She offered to have a word with the right people, but he stood his ground and wouldn’t let her. He fibbed about the eye chart; he’d overheard the man in front of him say the letters. In the Army, he felt so slow. Commands registered late on his ears. He dug French soil with a bayonet, pretending he was a child again, scratching in red clay for arrowheads.
He and the land go a long way back, though he’s better at birds and trees than he is at farming. Black walnut trees show the land is good. His mother grows the traditional crops of the Piedmont, corn and wheat and hay, but the overseer, Mr. Hopkins, does most everything. Mr. Hopkins and his wife practically raised Dudley. He spent so much of his childhood with them. Now that he’s grown, he and Mr. Hopkins still talk about weather and crops and fishing, but it was better when he was ten years old and could ride the tractor with Mr. Hopkins, then go up to their little house in the field, where Mrs. Hopkins gave him milk and pie.
Dudley has been telling his mother to let him buy a few cattle; he’d like to try his hand at raising them. She wants him to breed horses, to love them as she does, she who rode daily—sidesaddle, which is harder than riding astride, she likes to emphasize—rode until arthritis caught up with her. She scolds her daughters-in-law for their fear of horses. Only the loud one is comfortable in a saddle. Dudley doesn’t blame the others for their trepidation. Truth be told, he doesn’t much like horses. Falling and being thrown really hurt, and the animals are dangerous and sly, rewarding their benefactors with nips and bites, developing dozens of ailments that used to keep his mother out in the barn day and night, tending lame legs and sores and all manner of ills, never trusting stable boys or even veterinarians to do enough for her beloveds.
Luckily, the horse that kicked Dudley when he was twelve was just a foal, and he was standing close to it. The farther away you are, the worse the damage; the kick gathers power. He finds himself explaining this to Pamela as they sit on hassocks pulled close to the tree.
“That’s how I got this scar,” he says, pointing to his cheek, “and why my eye looks funny. It broke the socket.” Pressing the skin with his fingertips, he feels the craggy bone.
He and Pamela are smoking cigarettes, with square glass ashtrays on their laps. Where did the drink in his hand come from? There’s a bottle at his feet. Vaguely he remembers searching in a sideboard, closing his fingers around the bottle, insisting they celebrate. Pamela has a cup of eggnog in her hand, but she won’t let him add whiskey, because of the baby. He realizes she has never liked to drink, that she’s glad for the excuse of the baby. She is the only daughter-in-law who doesn’t drink champagne by the tumbler. The others are proud of how much they can hold. That always surprises him, how bold they are about it, how they tease his brothers for not keeping up with them. They do not tease him. He has collapsed in front of everyone, has fallen off the porch, has disgraced himself so many times. His drinking has ceased to be a joke. His brothers have had hard talks with him, prompted, he knows, by their mother, though all his brothers except Barrett keep six-packs of beer in their cars even for short drives, and Gordon, the only one who used to drink even more than Dudley and gambled, too, a high roller, Gordon ran over a man at a railroad crossing but never went to jail for it. During those talks, Dudley is Dovey again, meek and sickly, the youngest, nodding while a brother lectures. When the talks are over, he always goes out to his car in the garage and has a fortifying drink.
“I can’t imagine,” Pamela is saying, “what it would be like to grow up in such a big family. It must have been fun, with all those brothers.”
“A lot of the time it was fun,” he says. “Not always, though.”
“Children can be so mean to each other, even in a family,” Pamela says and nods, as if she’s the only one ever to realize this. She is the most innocent person he has ever known. He would die before he told her how his brothers used to shove him down the stairs; how it was Gordon’s fault that the foal kicked Dudley in the face, because Gordon was hitting the little horse with a stick.
Dudley and Barrett were at the mercy of the older boys. Vernon and Gordon were the worst. One time, Vernon held Barrett’s head underwater until Barrett almost drowned, right outside in the pond, frozen now with rough ice, his mother’s fantail goldfish sleeping numbly in its depths, descendants of the fish that lived there while Vernon pushed Barrett’s head under and laughed as Barrett thrashed, until Dudley and some of the others, he thinks it was John or Alex, the two oldest, pulled Vernon away. For the first time, he wonders if Vernon is crazy, if the cruel streak in him and Gordon is more than just meanness.
“Barrett has told me the others heckled him right bad. You didn’t, though,” Pamela adds, with a smile in her voice. “I thank you for that.”
“Barrett and me, we stuck together, being the youngest,” he says and drains his glass. When he sets it on the floor, his hands brush a familiar object, his glasses. He puts them on gladly.
“You and Barrett got the blue eyes in the family. Your father’s eyes. I’ve seen pictures of him. I wish I could have met him. That was a lot of children, wasn’t it?” Pamela says, as if she’s getting sleepy, as if she’s looking through a window far back on his life or Barrett’s life or maybe her own. After a pause she says, “It took me a while to learn all the names of your brothers. Barrett used to get me to say them out loud before we’d come here, to practice. Seven boys! John, Alex, Vernon, Gordon, Miles, then Barrett of course, and you. Gordon and Vernon, I used to get those two mixed up.”
“You do just fine,” Dudley says.
She is here beside him, her slippered feet tucked beneath her on the hassock, putting out her cigarette.
Then her eyes open wide. “Listen. What’s that sound?”
Dudley cocks his head. “I
t’s Philip. He’s in the kitchen to start breakfast.”
“You mean it’s morning?” Pamela is incredulous. That is what he’ll remember best about her: her amazement, what the other wives call naiveté. He’d never heard the word before they hissed it, bandying it about like a code. Naïve. It’s not a compliment. The other wives are more experienced, even the prissy one, who finds opportunities to remind everybody that she has a head for business; why, she kept the books at the airplane hangar where she met John and was mighty good at it, too. All but Pamela are experienced in this wide world, meeting it with fashionable faces and proud bosoms and maybe a cuss word and a hangover thrown in for good measure, some of them Yankees like his mother, and others, like the loud one, Miles’s wife, southern debutantes, and one—the shady one—a westerner, from Colorado or Nevada or some such place, with sun-strained eyes and a smile like barbed wire. Pamela has more class than any of them, and now she doesn’t have to worry about this family anymore. Her life will be her children, a life of hiding behind the youngsters as a way of avoiding these family gatherings; when she must come, she will mother her little flock every moment, hovering away from the grownups until even Barrett chides her.
Dudley knows his feelings for her will never change. She is his age, and she will put on weight with each child, and her hair will go gray early. Unlike the other wives, she’ll never color it, will stop wearing makeup and lipstick, and will wear shorts bought at a discount store and socks that fall down around her ankles, but to him she’ll always be breathtaking.
“It’s morning, all right,” Dudley says. Already he smells the wood in the stove. There’s a new electric range in the kitchen, but Philip prefers the old. Soon there will be bacon and eggs and biscuits, and oranges sliced in half, and small glasses of pineapple juice.
“I’ve never stayed up all night in my life,” Pamela marvels. “My sisters and I, when we were little, we used to try, but we always fell asleep.” She sets down her empty eggnog cup and rises from the hassock. “Nobody knows yet,” she says, “about the baby. Not even Barrett. I’ll tell him soon. Don’t say anything.”
Dudley stands too, swaying a little. An ache started some time ago, a drilling behind the eye with the socket broken so long ago by the foal. “I won’t tell anybody,” he says. He decides to stop drinking. Yes. Today. He’ll have a drink before breakfast, and that will be the last one. For good. Yet as the pain sharpens to a beam behind his eye, he knows he won’t stop, not now.
When at last he does, in forty years, he will do so by attending meetings three nights a week in many different counties, at country churches and VFW halls all over central Virginia, tiny buildings whose lights look orange as pumpkins in the dark. He will stop drinking, successfully and forever.
To his surprise, smoking will prove easier to quit. At seventy-five, he will attend a single session of hypnosis—he, who on this day-after-Christmas in 1953, would scoff at the idea of hypnosis. The hypnotist will announce to a hundred smokers in a Holiday Inn conference room, “Ladies and gentlemen, after I clap my hands, you won’t ever want another cigarette.”
In his sobriety, Dudley will realize the hollyhocks died back so completely each winter that they disappeared. He must never have contended with them when he crawled through the pantry window, yet the memory of those prickly stalks lives on in his hands. He will marry twice, both times in his old age, but those women are not Pamela, who will die long before he does.
“Time to give the lights a rest,” Pamela says and maneuvers carefully beneath the tree, as if she’s already months along in her pregnancy, to pull the plug. The time he has spent with her was far too short. He has never known a night to pass so fast, a morning to come so soon. Before the house wakes, before all the others wander downstairs and the hubbub of breakfast begins, he’ll answer the question she asked about how he chose this tree, how he couldn’t decide on one among the thousands of cedars and pines on his mother’s land, and then snow started falling, and all of a sudden there it was: this one.
Pamela announces, “The tree needs water. The bucket’s almost empty. I can tend to that.”
“Just stay here and rest,” he says. “I’ll do it.” He’ll get water, speak to Philip, and maybe take a drink to knock back the ache in his head, a hurt that cups his eye now as if the socket is one big bruise. He’ll have one drink, and then he’ll tell Pamela how he found the tree. “Want anything from the kitchen?” he asks.
“Oh, let me think a minute,” says Pamela, as if there are a thousand pleasant things she might desire.
It’s so early that the house is still charmed and secretive. In the room where Kenny sleeps, the fox brushes are gathered in close dark places. When Christmas is over, when all the others have departed, Dudley will go to that room with its sleigh bed and looming dresser and take out the swaths of fur that once belonged to living animals. It has been years since he thought of those foxtails, all soft and a lovely shade of red, with something of their wildness still there. Alone in that room, in the still silence of winter sunlight, he can hold up the brushes and admire them.
“A cup of coffee would be nice,” Pamela says, stretching her arms above her head, “with lots of cream and sugar.”
“Pamela,” he says, and the words come out as if he’s dreaming, “I love you.” He’s clear, mind and body, as if it’s been weeks since he drank—clear and steady. “I might as well say it.”
Pamela looks at him for a long time. She touches her hair, still tightly pinned, and smiles up at him. “I know,” she says. “I’ve always known. It’s okay.”
By the time he comes back from the kitchen, Pamela is gone.
Horse People
Barrett Fenton believed his father really did love all his sons the same. By October 1927, the oldest, John, was eighteen, and the youngest, Dudley, was two and a half. Barrett was next to last, almost eight. One Sunday, when church and dinner were over, Barrett was retrieving a book he’d left on the porch when his father started for the stable.
His father said, “Want to go riding with me?”
Barrett knew he was lucky, being out there at the right time. They were going to fetch a cook, his father said.
They already had a cook. “What about Nehemiah?” Barrett asked.
“Time for Nehemiah to go on home,” Barrett’s father said. “Retire.”
Barrett could hardly imagine the kitchen without Nehemiah stoking the coal stove and the woodstove, snacking on biscuit dough, and sharpening knives. Nehemiah was old, but he still seemed fine. “Why is it time?” Barrett said. “Is he going to die?”
“My guess is Nehemiah’ll be around a good many years, but your mother wants to hire somebody younger. We’ll pay Nehemiah every month, same as if he still worked for us. There’s a young man named Philip who’ll be our new cook. His father is a carpenter, but he’s sick,” Barrett’s father said. “I asked the doctor to go see him.”
Barrett knew his father, Richard Fenton, was an important man, a judge for the Orange County Juvenile and Domestic Court. People sometimes came to the house to seek his help outside court. Barrett’s father would sit with them on the porch, talking, and they’d leave with a lighter step. They’d tell Barrett, “Your father’s a good man, a fair man.”
His mother was not as fair. She had favorites among the boys, usually Alex and Miles, the second and fifth ones. These days it was Dudley, the youngest, because he was sick with scarlet fever. At the moment, Barrett knew, his mother was writing letters. She spent a great deal of time on correspondence with relatives, friends, and business associates. Barrett’s Aunt Iris was reading to the other boys. Barrett was supposed to be with them. He was on the porch only because he’d dawdled when getting his geography book.
“I’ve spoken to your mother already,” his father said, “and Iris.”
Barrett set his book on the swing, and off they went.
It would be the first time Barrett had ridden since getting over scarlet fever himself. His father would ride
Hurricane, a charcoal mare. Barrett had taken a long time to name his pony. It seemed to him that the best names were taken by his mother’s horses—Card Party, Florian, Arrow, and She Will. At last he’d settled on Skedaddle, a word his father liked.
Blood from the sire, beauty from the dam, Barrett’s mother often said. Horses were what she loved. Barrett knew his father didn’t feel the same passion for them, though Hurricane was a great favorite of his. He’d tell Barrett’s mother to watch out for horse people. Barrett didn’t understand. Weren’t his mother and father horse people, too? They were foxhunters. They were on the board of directors of the horse show. His mother didn’t trust people anyway.
Barrett’s father saddled up Hurricane and the pony, and off they went.
It was a blue-skied day, warm for October. “Beauteous,” Barrett’s father said, leaning his head back and letting Hurricane carry him along a grass trail within the pasture.
Usually, on weekends, Barrett’s oldest brothers—John, Alex, and Gordon—were home from college or boarding school. They’d go hunting. It was a fine thing on a fall day, to know his brothers would be coming back at suppertime with rabbits or quail they’d shot. Because Barrett had been sick, and Dudley still was, the older ones had to stay at school. Barrett had heard his mother on the telephone, her voice stern, which meant she was almost crying.
Very briefly—and not within Barrett’s memory—Barrett had a different younger brother, a child born between him and Dudley. “A beautiful baby who died in his crib,” his father told him once. “Don’t ask your mother about him.” Barrett wished he could remember that baby.
Barrett rode beside his father. Above them, buzzards wheeled so slowly; Barrett realized how patient they were, as if they weren’t hungry for whatever dead critter they were eyeing. Patience was something his Aunt Iris talked about, and the preacher, yet Barrett didn’t think they meant the buzzards’ kind. Barrett’s stomach clenched at the sight of them. He worried about his mother, worried she would fall from her horse when she was away from home, and that only buzzards would find her. Daily she rode, usually by herself.
Horse People Page 18