by Kent Haruf
Clevis Stouffer was a good part of that heedless drifting, though he was not the cause of it. I had my own motivation, my own inspiration. Clevis was merely ready on hand and more than willing to drift with me, content to ride along and to contribute his share. I had taken him on as hired man to help me work the Goodnough place, after leasing it from Edith, because he was a good hand, a good farmer. He knew then, and I believe he still knows, as much about Case tractors and Gleaner combines as any two men in the country, with the kind of curiosity about machines that can’t rest until it understands fully just why that loaded spring and that set of cogwheels have to interlock the way they do in order for the thing to work and propel weight.
He was a hell of a guy, Clevis was—big, sloppy, about six feet three and a good 230 pounds, with a heavy stomach above his belt that kept his shirttails free and flapping, and he was smart. There were people who thought he was stupid because he talked slow, but they didn’t know him. They hadn’t seen him tune a car or heard him recite an hour’s worth of dirty limericks in the Holt Tavern. I had known him since high school; he was usually on the outside fringe of things in school because he was so big and so slow and also because he had to work all the time, but sometime during our freshman year he decided that I was one of his friends, and that was all right with me. As for his family, Old Man Stouffer was a gandy dancer for the railroad. That is, on those days toward the end of the week when the old man was sober enough to work anywhere, and his mother, a fat little German immigrant, did wash for people in town and bore a string of babies. Clevis was the oldest of eleven kids. They all came to school in a flatbed truck.
When Clevis started to work for me I moved him into the house in much the same way that my dad had done with his crony Ellis Burns in the 1920s. We had the place to ourselves: my mother by that time had already spread herself into that new brick home in town with the rose carpets and the flowered coach. After a two-weeks’ honeymoon at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver she had come back to Holt and had begun her continuing tenure as Mrs. Cox, allowing Wilbur to go on shaking hands with folks at his life-insurance office and to drink coffee with the boys when he felt thirsty, but he damn well better be home by six o’clock every evening and squire her to church every Sunday. That apparently was satisfactory with Wilbur, and things were not unsatisfactory for Clevis and me. We worked pretty steady at keeping the ranch going and at making a profit for Edith. By the end of the first year, though, we had something of a problem: the house looked and smelled like a buffalo wallow, and there were enough empty beer cans accumulated at the back door to tin at least three sides of a big barn.
“By God,” Clevis said one morning. He was standing in the kitchen doorway holding his boots in one hand, looking like a great big sleepy kid who had just wakened from a dream that made him mad. “Listen,” he said. “Now this here is getting serious.”
“What is?” I said.
“This.” He held his boots up. “I can’t even find my goddamn dirty socks that I took off last night. Are you wearing them?”
“Hell, no. They wouldn’t fit me.”
“Well, by God, something’s got to be done about this. I can’t work without no socks.”
“Got any ideas?”
“Yeah,” he said. “One.”
Clevis’s one idea was Twyla Thompson. Twyla was a local girl with a happy red face. She worked seasons at the grain elevator beside the railroad tracks, and the men driving trucks loaded with wheat or corn took their time when they arrived at the elevator to dump the trucks, because Twyla had full breasts and skin like cream and she was always cheerful. She was built to last too, being as broad and muscular across the hips and shoulders as Clevis himself was, though she stood a good head shorter. The idea for Twyla was for her to move in with us, and I don’t know how Clevis did it, but somehow by striking the right chords or by pulling the proper strings he managed to persuade her to do that, to come out here and be a live-in maid, and it was like her that when she saw the advanced state of things in the house she gave us only a medium lecture and called us big filthy pigs. The maggots in the kitchen sink and the sour piles of clothes in the corners didn’t seem to phase her. In two days’ time she had the place in order again: there were white sheets on the beds, green vegetables on the table for the first time in nine months, and the beer cans were smashed flat and hauled to the dump. She was not a girl who was afraid of work. Between the two of us we took turns paying her monthly salary. She slept in the guest room with Clevis, though, so he was the only one who was exercising that other kind of option that went with her living here singly with two men. Not that I would have minded it myself, you understand—but Clevis had made the arrangement, and for a long time I tried to respect that.
Then I stopped respecting it. We had gone along well enough for four or five years. There were a few rocky spots, of course, but for the most part we had settled into an ordinary routine of working hard all week and then partying all night on the weekend, the three of us always together in the house and about the place and then still together those Saturday nights, with often another girl along to drink with us and to keep it balanced and occasionally to come home with me and not to go back until Sunday afternoon. But at first the work had been the primary thing. We managed in the beginning to maintain the level my dad had achieved. That’s true—we worked the ranch and the quarters of wheat and also the extras at Edith’s, all of that—but gradually it got to be more important and damn sure more fun to stay out at night, not just on Saturdays when everyone drank and danced and played cards and shot pool, but during the week too, even if we had to go out of town to locate people to party with, and then we weren’t getting up in the morning at five o’clock anymore, nor at six or seven either, and things were not getting done. It was all sliding; we were drifting. Instead of making four or five passes with the disk over the fallow ground, the summer fallow, now maybe two passes were enough and pretty soon one seemed like a good plenty. Sure, and it got so it was a good idea to buy a new red pickup so we could tour Denver on Tuesday. That’s right, and it became the thing to do to buy a barroom full of people all the drinks they wanted, never mind if you never saw them before and would never see them again. We were all friends, weren’t we? Of course, and mainly—why what harm could there be?—it got so it was perfectly all right to go to bed with Twyla. Both of us, I mean. Like we were still just taking turns paying her salary.
Only she wasn’t any whore. Far from it. She was Twyla Thompson, born and raised in Holt, Colorado. She was one of us, don’t you see?—a local girl with a fine red face who before she was persuaded to come out here to this ranch had worked cheerfully at the grain elevator amongst the clouds of wheat and corn dust. She was not the sort of woman to somehow shut off her emotions, her warm full feelings, while still leaving her legs open. So it began to take a toll on her. Christ yes, it had to do some harm. I remember that she learned finally to keep her own large supply of gin in the kitchen cupboard, that toward the end she was always at least half drunk by suppertime. We would sit down at the table to eat, the three of us, and her eyes would be too bright, like glass. Then she might spill some coffee, knock over the salt shaker. Once I remember she slopped some hot soup onto Clevis’s hand and she took his red hand up and kissed it and held it with tears in her eyes.
And that was the worst goddamn hell of it: all that time she was in love with him. Do you understand what I’m saying? I knew she loved him. She was good to him, good for him, that big sloppy open-faced Clevis Stouffer, with his flour-bag stomach and his flapping shirttails and his dirty socks. He was what she wanted, needed. They made a pair, the two of them together, like a couple of plain solid blocks of mineral salt. And on his part, though he never said so or even showed it much, I believe he was at least half in love with her. He certainly deserved something good in his life, and Twyla was that all right; she was good.
Only here I was—that’s what I mean—I was here, too. Things might have been all right if it h
ad been only two of us, or if Clevis and Twyla had lived in town, or even if they had rented some nearby vacant farmhouse or just bought a trailer and put in electricity. But none of that happened; that wasn’t the way it was. It was always three of us, here, in this house. We had our routine, our little family arrangement, and what made it possible, the thing that allowed it to continue, to go on and on regardless, was that in some ways they were both dependent on me: I owned the ranch, didn’t I? I was the hotshot, the rotten dowel pin. The bank account was in my name. And I played on all of that to prevent things from changing. I knew we were on a dangerous ride, but I still didn’t want to end it even if I had known how. It was too much of a good thing, a heedless, continuous, romping jig and party— when I could keep from thinking. Not thinking, refusing to think, got to be a steady habit for me.
I remember sending Clevis out for the afternoon to swathe hay, for example, or to buy baler parts in Sterling sixty miles northwest of Holt, while I stayed home. And he’d stare at me and say, “What are you going to do while I’m gone?”
“Oh, I’ve got those heifers to move.”
“Yeah,” he’d say. “Why course you do.”
So he understood it all right; he recognized the drift, but he would go on anyway, and then after he was out of the way I’d spend an hour sipping iced gin from a shared glass with Twyla in the middle of the afternoon, and in time I’d be breathing the good perfume of her thick orange hair and tasting the salt of her round white shoulders. Because after the first time with Twyla in my room in the afternoon while the sun speckled on the bed and the curtains billowed in the open window, the second time was easier. There was a lot less fumbling afterwards and somewhat less the need to avoid the look in anyone’s eyes, of playing it secret, of pretending there was nothing there between us to pretend about. Then after the third time it was easier yet. I stopped trying to justify anything but just accepted it as you might accept the shipping fever that came with a truckload of delivered sale-barn calves: there was always going to be some bad mixed up with the good. That’s how I was thinking—or not thinking. Matters would take their own irresistible course, I thought, and meanwhile more than anything it felt just fine to be in bed with Twyla. She had all that rich creamy skin, those large ready breasts like fresh bread, and she was soft all over with so much warm woman’s flesh to feel against your own. There was nothing professional about her, though. She wasn’t practiced or schooled at bed. No, it was more that lying with her—while you smoothed her stomach or stroked her rich thighs—for an hour there were little jokes between you and easy laughter, as if you and she were just two kids in clover, say, and that what you were doing in bed on clean sheets was not a thing that was dangerous or harmful to anyone but merely the simple play of children. Besides, being the warm-cheeked girl she was, she wasn’t used to refusing the feelings of anyone.
It went on that way for a year. Maybe more, I don’t know. But I remember how it ended. The consequences I can recall in detail. We were driving home one night, the three of us as usual, drunk in the cab of the red pickup after closing the Holt Tavern on a Wednesday. The radio was blaring Hank Williams above the rattle of wind coming through the rolled-down windows, and we were singing with the music and shouting jokes at one another as we watched ahead down the road through the windshield smattered red and yellow with dead grasshopper bodies, squiggling legs and veined wings. Then we were home again, here in this house, this kitchen. We each had another drink, and Twyla said she knew of one more joke she could tell us.
“You got our entire attention,” I said.
“Not mine,” Clevis said. “I got to bleed my lizard.” He stood up and went to the bathroom. Then he came back and opened another beer. “So what’s your joke?” he said.
“Promise you’ll laugh?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Because I think it’s funny anyway.” She wasn’t looking at us; she was watching her finger follow a scratch in the tabletop, as if that interested her. “It’s just that one of you gets to be a daddy pretty soon, and I don’t know whose name to pick.” Then she did look at us. “Don’t you think that’s funny?”
“Hell,” Clevis said. “You never could tell jokes.”
“Just a minute,” I said. “You’re telling us you’re pregnant?”
She nodded. Then she kind of laughed, her eyes shining at us with gin and what must have also been fear. “I mean I don’t know which one of you got me like this.”
“We could always draw straws,” Clevis said.
“And I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She was still smiling at us, but there were tears flowing down her cheeks now into her mouth, and she couldn’t wipe them away fast enough to keep up with them.
“What are you crying about?” Clevis said. “Hell, girl, you just bought the farm.”
“Don’t.”
“Why not? I can’t afford no kid. You and him hash it out.”
“But you promised me.”
“I never promised you nothing.”
Her mouth was still open in that awful smile. “You promised me you would laugh.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well: ha ha.”
“Leave her alone,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“I said leave her alone.”
“Now that’s funny—coming from you. That’s real funny.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Sure. You send me over to Sterling or some goddamn place else so you and her can jump in bed as soon as I’m gone, and now you tell me to leave her alone.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Wasn’t it? Well, don’t tell me about it. I couldn’t stand no more jokes tonight. I’m wore out.”
He got up then and started to walk back to the bedroom.
“Cleve,” Twyla said. “Honey, wait.”
“What for?”
“Don’t you want me to come with you?”
“Nah,” he said. “You can sleep with lover boy tonight. That shouldn’t be no surprise to anybody.”
Then he left the kitchen. We could hear him in the back bedroom stomping on the floor and after that the rattle of the bed when he lay down heavy to sleep. I sat with Twyla for a while, not talking; it was too late for talk; I wouldn’t have known the right words anyway. Finally I went to bed myself, leaving her sitting there with her red cheeks, like those of a healthy child, shining wet under the light. She had been an unselfish, uncomplicated girl, but now, six or seven years later, with my interference she had become something different. It was not only that she was pregnant without knowing for sure whose baby it was or that she didn’t know how to ask one of us to claim it—it was more that she had become a woman staring unfocused at a grease spot above a kitchen sink out here in the country in the small hours of a Wednesday night.
She was still here the next morning when I got up. She was asleep with her head twisted uncomfortably on the kitchen table, her shoulders slumped forward. I started some black coffee on the stove and went outside to see how the day looked. Clean, with high clouds gathering in the west, the day appeared acceptable. But the pickup was gone. I went back into the house. Twyla was awake. She looked as if during the night she had been disassembled and put back together with flour glue. Her face was all pasty.
“Did Clevis take the pickup?” I said.
“What?”
“Where did Clevis go?”
“Portland, Oregon.”
“What do you mean Portland, Oregon? Here, drink some coffee.” I poured coffee into a cup for her. “Drink it hot,” I said.
“He said because it was a long ways off,” Twyla said. “He said he wanted to see the water.”
“Water? Jesus Christ. What else did he say?”
“Nothing. Only for me to say he would send back money for the pickup when he found a machine job.”
“But I don’t care about the pickup. He can have the goddamn pickup. I want to know why you didn’t go with him.”
“Listen to me,” I said. “I don’t know what you think of me. Maybe you still like me some—I don’t know; we’ve had some good times—but whatever it is, you love him, don’t you? You want this baby you’re having to be his, isn’t that right?”
“I don’t want no baby. Not no more.”
“Yes, you do. You will. Here, listen now: I want you to go to Denver for a week or two. I want you to take yourself a motel room. Rest up, see some movies, buy some clothes, whatever you’re going to need. Then I’ll come there and see you have enough money so you can go to Oregon. Will you do that?”
“It won’t make no difference.”
“Yes, it will. It’s the only way, Twyla.”
“I’m just sorry,” she said.
But later that day Twyla allowed me to take her to Denver and to install her in a Holiday Inn near the Stapleton Airport. Then I came home and went about selling the remaining quarters of farmland my dad had accumulated. I take no pride in that. I had to sell some land anyway to pay off the bad debts I had run up through constant partying and buying red pickups and by acting as if I was so rich and so smart that any form of steady discipline could go to hell. Anyway, in part because of my debts, I decided to make a clean sweep of it, so I sold those last quarters and kept only the pastureland, the native grass and the hayfields, so I could still run cattle, and then I returned to Denver and put Twyla Thompson on the plane with fifteen thousand dollars in her purse.
All of that took longer than I expected. It was more like a month than two weeks. But by the time I checked her out of the motel Twyla looked quite a lot better. She seemed almost cheerful again, like a big wonderful farm girl, and her stomach was starting to show. “Sandy,” she said.