The next day Marsh dealt with undertakers, with friends determined to help, with the girls. We talked to our pediatrician who was as helpless as we were. He could recite theories: It seemed to happen most often between the first and third months of a child’s life. Most died in the fall of the year. No one knew the causes of crib death. I was sent to bed where I fell deep into a drugged sleep. Marsh took the white crib, so cunningly made that it folded together when the mattress was removed, out to the garage. With the ax he’d just bought to chop wood at the new farm, he hacked the screened crib that had held me, both our daughters and our son to pieces of wire and white splinters.
I didn’t say he shouldn’t have. I couldn’t. And neither one of us cried, “Why me?” though tempted. Marsh put the cradle back in our attic, folded the hammock and took it to the farm. He knew I cried sometimes at the mere sight of something. I fell into tears at the drugstore in front of the white cans of baby powder sitting blamelessly on the shelves. A friend came upon me just then and led me away. My grandmother wrote about “God’s mysterious will.” I tore the letter to small pieces. Her convictions remained her own. I couldn’t think God had anything to do with crib death. I blamed myself for stretching too far, for overworking and sleeping too soundly. Marsh had already claimed his guilt. I had another friend who, trying to be sympathetic, said, “I’d die if something like that happened to me.”
I simply stared at her. I was alive. I had two other children too small to understand grief and bewildered by ours. Most everyone was as kind as they could be. They brought food, answered the phone, collected addresses from flowers, offered to put away baby clothes and toys. No, I told them, no. I had to touch everything Martin had touched
For weeks I could barely talk to Marsh. I knew he would help me if I’d let him. I didn’t want help. I wanted to be left alone, to sit in a walled space where I couldn’t be touched. I sought remoteness, day-dreamed of cloistered walls of ivy clambering over stone. If I’d had family there, I could have called on them to keep the girls those first weeks, but the Moores were too far away. I sent Kate and Sally to Aunt Sarah for two days. Once they had left I washed and folded Martin’s clothes. It’s odd how hands seem to have a life of their own, how mine still knew how to smooth and fold material, to lift the lid of the cedar chest that had been my mother’s and to stack Martin’s small gowns and shirts inside.
I was glad the crib was gone, that Marsh had smashed it He’d returned to finish working through December at the archives, had left the thick quiet of our house. I took the phone off the hook. There were only mechanical noises, the refrigerator humming, the washing machine cycling, the gas space heaters sighing. I sat in a rocking chair in our children’s room looking through the north windows at empty limbs, dried vines, straggling grass. My mind was full of Martin’s life, the one he might have had, the stages he would have gone through. I could imagine, in brief flashes, not in life’s whole, his first steps, first words, first birthday … balloons, vanilla ice-cream, yellow two-layer cake, the girls blowing out his single candle for him while Marshall took pictures of us all. I had to stop. Next day I called Aunt Sarah to bring the girls home. I wasn’t through grieving. I would never be through wondering how such a thing could happen. I just couldn’t go on staring out windows and making up our lives.
I have a picture of Martin on my dresser. It’s a small black and white one Marsh happened to take, of me rocking him in my lap while sitting in the hammock under the catalpa trees soon after he was born in September. The leaves, almost ready to fall, still offer a dappled shade.
THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD
Marshall was quiet, so quiet he hardly said a word all the way back to the place. Not wanting to leave him in the back all alone, Carter put the boy in the front seat between him and Sarah. He was used to bridling and saddling, to working with cinches and bits, but he’d fumbled at first with the door after Sarah, in her quick way, reminded him with a silent glance, how the boy’s parents had died. Carter knew he would remember the day they went to pick up their nephew long after Marsh was a grown man with children of his own.
When they learned they couldn’t have a child, he and Sarah comforted themselves by telling each other there were enough children in the world, certainly enough in their families. They would enjoy their nieces and nephews. The horses they raised would be useful for riding lessons. Maybe they would have gone on believing other people’s children were enough, maybe they would have gone on making do and it would have been all right. But they got Marshall, and everything was different. The world grew rounder, Carter decided. He was given to amplitude, to ease and patience. Sarah … well, Sarah was different. He’d realized early he was drawn to her because she was. She had piercing eyes, soothsaying eyes, though too often she foresaw darkness. He often teased her out of gloom. Not that day though.
“He may still be in shock,” she warned when they left home to drive over to Henry’s.
It was early in the summer, ]une. Rains were good that year. They had just planted the second crop of coastal. The field was a dark brown patch outlined in green. Indian blankets and coreopsis turned the ditches by the highway into a red and yellow blur. With enough rain the hill country looked rich, grass and wildflowers almost covered the limestone ridges. By August the land would begin to show its bones again.
“Surely he’ll still be grieving,” she said. They had already waited for a week after his parents’ funeral before meeting with the rest of the family to decide who would raise ten-year-old Marshall. Marshall’s father, Carl McNeil, had two brothers and a sister, and his mother Liz had one brother and five sisters. As large as both families were, they had all agreed Carter and Sarah should take the boy. A sister on each side had never married. The rest either had all the children they could look after and men gone off to serve, or were too old or unsuited one way or another. Carl hadn’t said in his will who should raise his son, neither had Liz. They had trusted the family to work it out. In forty-two with a war on nobody knew what might happen anyway.
When he and Sarah arrived at Henry’s, Carter still had to ask him, “Are you sure?” With two boys of his own, Henry was the only other real candidate. Everyone agreed a boy needed a father, and both of them had agricultural exemptions from the draft. Henry was running the home place. Carter who’d sworn there must be other ways of making a living beside raising cotton, had taken up breaking horses and chasing cows for the Double-W, the nearest ranch of any size. Slowly he and Sarah were buying their own ranch.
“You and Sarah will be good for him. He’ll get all the attention this way. We’ll all help, Carter.”
He’d told him they would probably need all the help they could get. Except for having nieces and nephews out to spend weekends, he and Sarah had no experience with children. Just then Marsh started downstairs in a pair of faded green shorts, a white tee shirt and tennis shoes already looking too small for him. A big old brown-striped suitcase, one of his father’s probably, bumped against one leg. And, looking up at him, at his eyes intent on his steps, his hair still showing the thrust of a wet comb through it, his mouth set in a line, Carter reached for the suitcase. “Let me help you,” he said. Sarah eyes were full of tears as she spread her arms wide to welcome the boy.
At first they were uncomfortable, mainly they were all unsure, but there was time for them to get used to living with each other before school started. Marshall had never been talkative. Accustomed to being the only child, he could amuse himself for hours reading alone. Sarah didn’t want that. She coaxed him into the kitchen, let him read at the round oak table while she made cookies, got him to talk while he ate. Every night they sat in the living room listening to some anonymous droning voice or Winchell’s frenzied report of the war news. Marshall, filled with a child’s outrage, announced, “I hate Hitler!” Carter started to laugh and held it. In a way he too hated Hitler although he’d never profoundly hated anyone or anything except perhaps cancer and a long drought.
Slowly th
e boy began to join their lives, to go with him to the barn, to look after a puppy somebody had dumped at the farm’s front gate, to watch when he gave the young horses their first lessons. Marsh gave him back his boyhood. He took him catfishing in the creek and taught him the patience required to train a two-year-old to allow a saddle to touch his back. Often he was startled to hear his father’s sayings coming out of his mouth, to listen to himself telling Marsh, “Every horse has its own personality.” The boy’s questions led him to speak of things he’d hadn’t spoken of often. Raised mainly in town, a visitor in the country, he wanted to know everything—who had owned the land before any of the McNeils did, why stallions were inclined to be more nervous than geldings, what led quail to nest on the ground and lose their hatch to a heavy rain, exactly how wet roads could make cars skid.
Of course, they told him it was a car wreck. It was a rainy night and the car skidded. Who was going to tell him any different? Some of them on Liz’s side didn’t know or didn’t want to know. The McNeils kept quiet. Probably no one knew the whole story but Henry and him. And they couldn’t really know more than about half, Carter decided. That was all right. Carl and Liz could have mended the quarrel everybody knew they’d been having, an old fight about money, saving or spending. Every young couple had the same one then. There was so little of it, and Carl had just lost his land to the government’s new airfield. They’d paid him, but not enough to buy the same acreage. There was something more. Always was. Carl had a terrible temper and Liz equaled him. They shouted at each other when they were mad, and sometimes they hit each other, Carl had confessed to Henry. Maybe they had made up by the time their car went off the road into the river. Carter, thinking about that moment, always hoped that they died from the fall down the cliff, not from drowning in the car. He couldn’t drive that road without wondering about them. A lot of country was marked for him … a rose bush in a pasture was all that was left of the log cabin where Mama and Daddy spent their first year, the spring where he found arrowheads after rains, the Spanish oak he’d come upon half-covered with a silvery collapsed weather balloon, the fence post with a hole hiding a wren’s nest. Some he’d marked himself like the graveyard for favorite horses—Keeper, Dan, Samson—all buried under tall crosses made of metal poles. Between them laid the dogs, their names on wooden crosses … easier to carve those than to scratch the horses’ names in. His fences followed property lines made before he was born. Probably the house and barn would last longer. In the end the country could easily claim it all again just as the river claimed Carl and Liz … never had shown Marsh that spot … better for him not to know. At the time he’d been safe at Henry’s, spending the night with his cousins.
Twelve years later when Marsh came home for Thanksgiving bringing Marianne, Carter thought of the small boy coming down the stairs holding onto the too-big suitcase like it was part of his life. That was the way he held onto Marianne’s hand, like it or not, he and Sarah watched him switch loyalties. Strange at first … Marsh going off so far to school and wanting to marry somebody from up in Tennessee. What did that matter? After all the McNeils had come from there. Outgrowing the ground his father held, his own father shifted his way west right after the Civil War. Sarah’s people started out in Virginia and got to Texas a generation earlier. Marianne talked different, Sarah said, forgetting her own people had. Why shouldn’t Marianne? A city girl from the South. Marsh wanted a wife. It was going to be someone. He was prepared to get along with her. Sarah was a harder case. Women, he thought without rancor, always believed there was more at stake.
After Marsh and Marianne had left they sat on the porch and talked while the dark settled in.
Sarah’s voice was hesitant when she began. “Her family sounds … I don’t know … peculiar. She laughs about them a lot, but I wonder—Sounds to me like they’ve gone to drink and decline.”
“Maybe we sound the same to them,” he teased. “An old cowboy and his wife who wears her boots in the kitchen from a family still hanging onto land so drought-bitten nobody can raise anything but rocks.”
“Still…. ”
“It doesn’t matter how they sound, Sarah. He’s going back up there and he’ll marry her. And it doesn’t matter she wasn’t raised in the country and isn’t a Baptist. She’s a good rider.”
“Horses!” Sarah accused him. He could almost see her eyes glinting in the dusk. “That’s all you think about! That girl doesn’t go to church even.”
“Oh well,” Carter said mildly. He wasn’t heavy on church himself. Religion took all kinds of shapes. There were plenty that showed up every Sunday that weren’t particularly good folks. Sarah would like Marianne well enough given some time.
It took longer than he’d thought. Most women he’d known became friends in their kitchens, but Marianne would hardly come near Sarah’s. Of course, like the rest of them, she did walk in the house through the kitchen door … carrying a pie sometimes. She was good with pies, even Sarah admitted. Otherwise she stayed close to Marsh, went out to the stables with him, rode with him, sat in the living room with both of them like she didn’t know she should be in the kitchen. It got so he had to get in the kitchen himself, set the table, pour the iced tea. If he didn’t Sarah worked up such a head of steam, he feared she’d let it boil out on the girl.
Washing up after they left, Sarah snapped, “She’s used to servants, I guess. Well, I won’t be hers! Miss Hoity-Toity!”
“Oh, Sarah—”
“Whether they had help or not, she should know it’s only common decency—Nevermind!” She reversed herself as she was liable to when she got mad. “I can do them. I’m used to doing dishes.”
“You could ask her—”
“I don’t want to.”
Stubbornness starched her back so, it aggravated him. Her shoulders bent, her hands clutching the side of the sink, she looked like a cat about to hiss. He started toward her, came as near as he ever had to shaking her before he caught himself. Ashamed at his anger over such a small thing, he edged away to stack the plates he’d just dried in a clattering heap on the cabinet’s shelf.
He didn’t understand why she wouldn’t let go a little, but what was the use of quarreling with his own wife over kitchen chores. Sarah wasn’t altogether uncharitable. She’d forgiven him many a time for snubbing a horse too close. Those first years when they were trying to make a little extra by breaking other people’s horses at home, she’d been the one on back of her own gelding with the reins of the horse he was breaking wrapped around her saddle horn. Close, sometimes so close they were leg to leg and he feared breaking hers, but she kept his horse from throwing his head up and bucking. They worked together like they had one mind. She wasn’t of the same mind now. She wasn’t unkind, not outright, but she continued to be a fault-finder.
After a while Marianne started helping more. She was the one who laid the table. Marsh must have caught on. Probably he told her she needed to do something beside pies. He began putting up the dishes, said he remembered where everything went, so Marianne took over the washing. It was like they had agreed on this between themselves before they drove out to the country.
Then it was clothes. Sarah thought she either dressed up too much or not enough. She came out to the house wearing high heels the first time. Later she took to wearing blue jeans every visit, and that didn’t suit Sarah any better.
He argued, “If she goes to the barn with us, she needs to wear britches.’
“She could wear some that don’t need mending,” Sarah snapped. Marianne displeased her by being herself. Eventually he saw jealousy was part of it. Sarah hadn’t wanted to let go of Marsh. They were late getting him. Maybe she hadn’t got through mothering by the time he married. When he faced her with this, she said they had only raised him to let him go like she knew she was supposed to say it. Her hardness wore on him.
As a boy Marsh didn’t inherit much of Carl’s temper, but when he sensed any sort of unfairness he was quick to talk back. About the ti
me he was fourteen he began to get in fights, generally with bigger boys. Maybe it wasn’t all because of bullying; high spirits led to fighting sometimes like it did with young horses. Marsh was light, so he lost a lot. One of his teachers suggested they get him to run track. He was too light for football, running would be good for him. Accustomed to training young horses to a long walk and a fox-trot for men who needed a good traveling horse to ride all day, running for the sport of it seemed a strange notion at first. When Marsh began running he walked beside him on a horse, then at the boy’s insistence, let him go alone. Probably it was too discouraging to run against a horse. The world grew again, stretched out to the oval of a racecourse where Marsh ran against other boys, ran against time. Sarah and he went to all the meets, talked to the rest of the parents.
“We should adopt him,” Sarah said.
But hadn’t they already? And hadn’t he adopted them?
Sarah seemed to agree until he married. Not until the babies were born did she soften up. At first she thought Marianne ought to quit her job and stay home with the children. He told her not to say so. She didn’t need to say anything directly. Instead, she asked Marianne a lot of sharp questions about the woman she’d hired to help, talked about the shortness of childhood, carried on about the girls. They came to visit whenever Marianne would let them. Sarah complained it wasn’t often enough. Gradually Kate and Sally did what Marianne couldn’t do alone. They played with measuring spoons and old tin bowls and dough till Sarah taught them both how to make biscuits even though Kate was the only one really old enough to learn.
They were messing around with that about the time he retired … too soon. No help for it, and no use to feel sorry for himself either. He wasn’t needed. That was all. He kept telling Sarah he wasn’t unhappy. Well, maybe he was a little. People quit buying horses for a while; or they weren’t interested in the kind he trained, or in the eighties, less of them could afford horses. He kept three of his own, two geldings he loosed to run in the small pasture in front of the house and a stallion he put to stud. The stallion brought him a little company, brought people who liked to talk horses. Easy to stand around a corral or down at the feed store jawing, too easy. He turned to improving his small herd of cattle, to trying different breeds of bulls then began restoring an unused horse trap behind the barn. He planted native grasses mixed with wildflowers—big bluestem, Indian grass, little blue, side oats, and switch grass, combined with Engehlman daisies, Maxmillian sunflowers, bluebonnets, coreopsis, paintbrush, gay feather. Many of the wildflowers like pucoon and purple dalea he’d never heard of before. Blistering his hands harvesting, he resowed, repeating the names to Sarah until she knew them, the same way they had taught the name of heroes and dates of battles to Marsh. Gave him history, he said when he went off to college to study more of it. Carter filled in the hours with other tasks. In wet times he mended water gaps, checked on fence staples, kept after the weeds in his vegetable garden, and in dry months he shored up the small dam he’d built on the creek, reset fence posts, cleaned out the tank, repaired gates. The country busied him enough. Sarah, when they were younger and poorer, kept chickens, but he wouldn’t raise hogs. He’d take up serious fishing before he’d take up hogs.
Where We Are Now Page 9