She tried to listen to the minister, but she could barely hear him, his high voice drifting away. “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” Cynthia couldn’t believe him. She played the piano in church and sang in the choir and knew what he was really like. When she talked to him, his gaze kept shifting away, over her shoulder, as if someone more important might appear.
Her eyes would not stay closed. She looked again at the people around her. Harold Cray stood nearby, which had to be a mistake. For no apparent reason, her dad had always held a dislike for Harold, though she sometimes sang with him in choir. He looked strange, maybe retarded, and showed up at rehearsals in his motorcycle leathers. But his voice was beautiful, clear and steady, as if he might have trained for years.
It was 1984, but nearly all the girls her age wore turquoise eye shadow and white-pink lipstick that had been out of style for years. Their hair was swept back in wings, spun large, and sprayed stiff with hair spray. The faces she could see looked solemn, close to tears. She never wore makeup, and she cut her own hair in a short, angular style, one side longer than the other. Dressing for the funeral, she’d tried to brush it smooth, make it hang straight in a wedge across her cheek, but the air was so dry it lifted single hairs and floated them around her face like dandelion fluff. Her mother complained the haircut made her look unfeminine, but her father never said a word about it.
The minister talked on, his maroon robe hanging straight down, the long satin lapels gleaming, as if they were damp, in the sun. Raised up on a blanket of artificial grass, the tiny coffin looked like a cake on a trolley.
She remembered a picture from Bible school. A picture of Jesus with long red hair and blue robes, squatting on a stool while fat little children gathered at his feet. His toes were long and squared off at the ends, his big feet crossed with leather sandals. It made her think about Curly Lattimore, the little girl in the coffin. She pictured her walking up to Jesus—and Jesus reaching out his hand. Her throat tightened. Before, she hadn’t even thought about Curly or the Lattimores.
The Lattimores sat in folding chairs behind the grave. Carol shushed an infant in her lap. Rich looked angry, his forehead bunched as if he were fighting not to lose control in front of all these people.
The minister raised his hand to give the benediction. Cynthia muttered under her breath, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen,” and that was the end. Nobody walked up with flowers, and the coffin wasn’t lowered into the grave. The Lattimores rose from their chairs and filed down the hill. In the parking lot they climbed into a big copper-colored car. Then everyone else began to shuffle down. Somehow Cynthia and her parents were stuck in the back of the crowd, and she had to take small steps to keep from bumping into the woman in front of her. Off to the side, she saw two girls from school, their arms around each other, weeping. They were enjoying any excuse to cry. It made her want to laugh.
She climbed in the backseat of the car behind her father, his hat blocking her view. She tried again to smooth down her hair. The skin around her eyes felt even tighter and more pinched, and her lips were chapped. Her mother wondered out loud if they should go down to the hotel for dinner. “That’s where everyone will be,” she said.
Cynthia pictured the café, the ranchers and their wives all arriving as they normally would after church. They’d leave their own tables and stand around in their church clothes talking—about the same things they talked about when there wasn’t a funeral.
“Don’t think I’d better,” her father said. “I’ve got a steer needs doctored.”
“Maybe we should just stop by?” her mother said.
“I’d better not,” her dad said. “But you two go ahead if you want. You can drop me off at the place.”
“No,” her mother said, “let’s all go home.”
They drove into the ranch yard, and she and her mother climbed out to let her father put the car away. Inside, her mother hung up her coat and slipped her apron on. Cynthia kicked her shoes off and carried them up the stairs in one hand. The shoes smelled of new leather and the inside of a department store. She dropped them in the bottom of her closet.
She jerked her dress off over her head, the material alive with snapping sparks, and her slip and stockings clung to her fingertips when she tried to fold them in the drawer. She took off her bra and pulled on a flannel shirt, worn thin across the shoulder blades, and jeans. The shirt was soft and cool on her back and on her chest. She sat down on the edge of the bed and scuffed her bare feet on the stiff nap of the carpet.
It felt strange to be home on a school day. She didn’t know what to do with herself. She wanted to go practice, but she waited until she heard her father change his clothes and go outside.
She pulled a sweater over her shirt, so her mother wouldn’t notice she’d taken off her bra, and went downstairs. Her mother was sliding a black-speckled roasting pan into the oven. Cynthia walked through the kitchen into the front room.
Cynthia hated everything about the new house, except the view. The house had been built over a raised basement on the ridge of the canyon, only a few miles south of the cemetery. Out the plate glass window of the front room, Cynthia gazed across the valley to the river and the mountains beyond. She walked over to the piano, a small upright the ash-blond color of church furniture.
She slid the bench out and sat down, lifting back the hinged cover and spreading her fingers over the keyboard. Lightly, she let her hands hover, barely touching the keys. Without making sounds, she moved from chord to chord, up one octave and back down, feeling the memory in her fingers flex. Finally, she pressed her fingertips cleanly down, one chord. It rumbled through the house, resonating in her spine. She stepped heavy on the pedal, to make the strings vibrate like an organ, and started into a hymn. She stayed in the lower registers and made the bass notes roll and thunder. Abruptly she stopped. Her mother was standing in the doorway.
“Play something more appropriate,” she said.
Cynthia began to play an old English carol, a piece composed of single notes and a repeating chorus. It was very simple, and she played it once through at the right tempo. Then she began to vary the timing, to stretch out the rests until it seemed like a new and modern piece of music. When she looked again, her mother had an unhappy, disapproving look on her face. Her nose seemed swollen and red, as if she’d been crying. As if she knew how easy it was for Cynthia to make people sad, and she was disappointed by it. She turned back to the kitchen.
Cynthia stood and almost closed the piano. Instead she rifled in the piano bench for the music she was practicing, set the pages on the piano, and began to play. She played best in the early morning, just after her father went out to do chores. Her head seemed clearer in the cold, thin light.
When she was small, there had been a place far down in the fields, off their land, where willows had grown up to hide a spring. She called it a spring, but it was only a seep, a low, muddy place where someone had built a chicken house with a small fenced yard. She’d gone back to find it once, but the coop was gone. Under a mat of long, flattened grass, she’d found pieces of dark orange wood that turned to powder in her hand. She was amazed at how small the yard must have been, how she could have spent so many hours there. Often, as she started playing, she went back to that place, the way it had been.
She worked on the piece in parts. Then she played it straight through, to hear it as it might sound in concert, as if someone else were playing. When she heard her father’s voice in the kitchen, her fingers stiffened and lost their confidence. She tried to go on, but he called her from the kitchen.
She put her music away, closed the piano, and went to see what he wanted. He was bent over on the bench in the mud room, one leg across his knee, tugging off a black rubber irrigation boot.
“You didn’t feed your animal,” her father said.
“I’ll go right now,” she said.
“Already turned her out,” he said.
Cynt
hia felt numb. The old horse was full of tricks. It would take an hour to catch her in the morning.
4
Lenna directed Kenneth down a side street, a wide street paved with a thin layer of light-colored concrete. Hers was an old neighborhood of small frame houses set far apart, without foundations or porches or shrubs. Only a few spent lilacs stood in the yards, their blossoms dried and shriveled into curly knots. The whole neighborhood looked temporary, as if the houses could be pushed from one yard to another. For the first time, Lenna felt ashamed of where they lived. She tried to take comfort in the massive cottonwoods rising over the roofs of the houses, shimmering with heart-shaped yellow leaves.
The house she’d rented stood alone on the far edge of town with only pastures and low barns beyond it. The small gray house, just one floor and an attic, had been newly painted. But rain had weathered the front door in black streaks, and one of its small windowpanes had been replaced with a blind square of plywood. She never noticed these things; her habit was to drive in back and park beside the caved-in chicken coop. But Ken parked the truck in front, and she had to let him follow her across the dull, spongy grass and through the front door. It wasn’t locked.
Their footsteps echoed across the linoleum in the front room. Except for a black wood-burning stove, the room was empty. For lack of funds to ship it, she’d left behind what little furniture they’d had. He followed her into the kitchen.
The kitchen was painted pale yellow all around the bottom, but above the wainscotting, a different pattern of wallpaper survived on three of the four walls. With age, the roses and plaids and forget-me-nots had faded and blended. The kitchen seemed to gather in around a wooden table she and Kenny had painted white. Two chairs were pulled up to the table: her small spindle chair with its steeple back, and the wide-armed rocker where Kenny sat to write out his homework. Kenny had draped a chocolate-gray cotton blanket, a boy’s Indian blanket printed with lightning and arrows, over the back.
Automatically Lenna began to pick up the breakfast dishes she and Kenny had left out that morning when both of them had overslept. Even the milk carton had been left standing out, and a sweet, souring smell clung in the air. When the table was clean, she pulled her coat around her, crossed her arms, and looked at Kenneth Swanson where he stood on the other side of the table.
Ken didn’t speak. He lifted one boot up on the seat of the spindle chair, crossed his wrists on his knee, and regarded her. His dark, muddy boot made her chair look undersize, a chair built for a child, and his hunting vest cast watery orange reflections on the walls. She and Kenny spent all their time in this room, and it never struck her as too small. But with Kenneth Swanson in it, the kitchen felt cramped and shabby. She stared back at him. At his square, unshaven jaw, where beard stubble glistened through dirt and sunburn. His hair was reddish-brown, but slicked flat, wet and shining, it seemed black. Against the darkness of his face, his eyes seemed lighted from within, like winter sunlight passing through a pale blue bottle.
“Why not?” he said, as if he’d just told her he was taking Kenny hunting.
“How did you get here?” she demanded.
“Where’s Kenny?”
“I don’t know.” She looked around the room, as if the furniture might tell her. “What time is it?”
He lifted his shirt cuff with two fingers and glanced down at a heavy silver watch. “Five o’clock.”
“He’ll be home soon.”
“You don’t know where he is,” he said flatly.
“How was he supposed to know you were coming?” She hated the whiny sound of anger rising in her voice. She took a breath and tried to speak slowly. “He’s just late from school. He’s playing basketball or something.”
“It’s not basketball season.”
“How did you get here?”
“I got leave,” he said. “Hitched a ride on a transport plane. Borrowed the truck and horses from a master sergeant in Farson. Picked up a map.”
Lenna had forgotten the lazy southern drawl that came into his voice after he joined the air force—the same southern accent most pilots use when they radio the tower. His family was from Nebraska, the same as hers was. He grinned, proud of himself and trying to look innocent, even boyish. It almost worked on her—she felt her throat catch. He looked so much like Kenny. But the accent grated on her, scraped against old angers.
“Beer?” he asked her. But his look said he knew her so well he didn’t even have to ask. She shook her head, and he stood abruptly and walked out of the room. She heard the front door slam.
As soon as he was gone, she saw the window glass had turned to cobalt blue, and she was standing in the dark. She switched on the light and the room jumped back, large and familiar but cold. She hadn’t stopped to light a fire. She hurried into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She ran a brush through her hair, where the wind had tangled it around her face and dulled it to a dry wheat color, and looked into her own deep-set blue eyes. Her eyes were not transparent like Ken Swanson’s, but the flat, dusky blue of a feather from a bluebird. She pinched her cheeks to bring some color and thought of putting on lipstick. But Ken would notice lipstick.
She was ashamed of herself, of her furtive trip to the bathroom, but she couldn’t help it. Exactly why she wanted to look prettier she didn’t know. She leaned down to hide the hairbrush out of sight in the cupboard. When she stood, she saw the note taped to the mirror frame. It had been there since that morning. It said “rodeo grounds.” She had promised to go after Kenny.
She nearly ran back into the kitchen, but once there she couldn’t find her purse. She looked on Kenny’s rocker and under the table. Finally, she saw the handles of the purse standing up behind the folded laundry on the dryer. She grabbed it and started out, rummaging for car keys, but at the door she stopped. Her fingers couldn’t find the shape and weight of keys. She turned back, pried open the mouth of the purse, and dumped its contents on the kitchen table, pennies rolling off onto the floor. Her car keys weren’t there. The keys were in the car. And the car was parked where she’d left it, across from the courthouse.
She stood for a moment feeling panic rise in her, like soda shaken in a bottle. She would walk back to the courthouse. It wasn’t that far. Or she could force herself to wait there for Ken. She grasped the back of Kenny’s chair and rocked it back and forth.
The front door slammed, and Ken returned, cradling a six-pack under his arm and using both hands to open a beer can.
“How long will you be gone,” she asked, “if you take Kenny with you?” She tried to stop them, but as she spoke, tears caught in her throat.
“Oh, hell . . . forget it. Don’t cry.” Ken swung around the table and enclosed her in his arms. She stiffened, but he held her so tightly she could feel the shotgun shells in the compartments of his vest. They made sharp knobs that cut right through her coat.
“That’s not why I came,” he said. “I won’t take him. Don’t cry.”
“Why?” she said. “Why did you come?”
“To tell Kenny I’m getting married.”
“What?” she said, and heard the back door slam behind her. She shoved Ken hard, twisting out of his grip, and faced the door.
Kenny stood in the doorway, his eyebrows drawn together in a moment of confusion. He didn’t look at Lenna. His eyes were fixed on the man beside her. As she watched, he pressed his lips together and his mouth began to tremble and pull sideways. She thought he might break into a grin—or cry. But she was wrong.
He did something she’d never seen him do before, even as a baby. He threw himself at his father. Ran at him like a small boy. And his father lifted him right off the ground.
5
Cynthia wanted to argue with her father, but she knew there wasn’t any use. And Goldie was already turned out in the pasture. She watched Earl work off his coveralls, gray railroad coveralls with a herringbone stripe in the weave. Even after chores, he had the neat scrubbed look he’d had at the funera
l. His cheeks were closely shaved, and she could still smell the too-sweet tang of his aftershave. At that moment, his eyes seemed to match the blue-gray of his coveralls. He looked as if he’d soaked out all the color in his face when he washed up for the funeral.
“Go set the table,” he said.
Cynthia almost reached for the Sunday china before she remembered it was Friday and brought out everyday plastic plates instead. She thought about Goldie, her old horse. Dill gave her Goldie after his accident, when she was hardly big enough to ride. Her dad talked against it, told Dill the horse was worth real money, but he and Dill Nethercott didn’t fight. They’d been best friends all their lives.
She never forgot to feed and water Goldie, but somehow the change of routine, coming home early and going to a funeral, had thrown her off.
She set three places at the table, her mother and father at each end, and sat down. Her father sliced into his baked potato and wedged in a square of margarine, but it didn’t melt. He cupped the potato in his hand, holding it up to demonstrate that it was cold. Then he set it back on his plate and held the plate high.
“Mother,” he said, “go heat this up.”
“How is yours?” Her mother turned to her. “Cold?” Cynthia fingered her potato and nodded.
“I’ve got some others in the oven,” her mother said. She gathered the plates. In a few minutes, she was back distributing hot potatoes. Her father doctored his again and started lifting forkfuls to his mouth.
Cynthia studied her mother’s calm face. Her parents weren’t going to let her go to the dance. Not when they’d been to a funeral. “I’m supposed to go to school tonight,” she said. “There’s a dance. They asked me to bring some tapes.”
Love and Country Page 3