At a shooting gallery she threw away two dollars in dimes before hitting her target. “This little lady …” the barker said, bellowing it. The prizes were tawdry and worthless, and she settled for a paperweight with a winter scene and snow sifting down. She stuffed it, along with the rest of the junk, into a shopping bag that had DUTCHESS COUNTY FAIR printed on it.
The prize didn’t mean anything: it was the affirmation, like a good omen. We’re all superstitious, she thought. And when she wandered into the livestock section she saw Douglas right away. He was among a clutch of countrymen who were dickering over some animals. On the block was a big bull with wicked red eyes and terrible horns, and Douglas was calling his bid.
Needs it to stud his calves, Margo thought, all very earthy and primal. She stood fairly near him, and then he saw her. “Hello, bright-eyes,” he said, grabbing her elbow. “Stick around, this won’t take long.”
She started getting very excited as the bidding went up. It was evident that Doug meant to have that bull. “Six hundred,” he called out.
“Six fifty,” someone else said.
“Seven hundred.”
There was a short silence, then, “Seven fifty.”
“Eight,” Douglas said, his jaw set.
This time there were no more bids.
The gavel came down. “Going … going … gone!”
There was a round of applause, and the bull was loaded into a truck, goaded up a ramp, and the gate closed. “A good job done,” Doug said, and told the man behind the wheel to drive home slowly and carefully.
“Roger and out,” the driver said, and drove off, the bull bellowing.
“Aren’t you ever afraid?” Margo asked.
“Only of women.”
“I’ll bet.”
“And now that that’s done, how about a drink?”
They left the Fair grounds and went into a local bar. “Don’t order a cocktail,” he warned her. “Just straight whiskey, with a chaser.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. I called the house. I wanted you to come with me, but you’d already left. Pompey said you were headed this way. Needless to say I was delighted.”
“Really? How about your pregnant cow?”
“Doing her post partum exercises … she dropped around three this morning.”
“Fine, fine. Girl or boy?”
“Girl, name’s Margo.”
She laughed. “Really?”
“I thought we agreed on that.”
“We did. I’m very set up. I must knit her some baby things.”
“She’d appreciate that.”
“Then I’ll get started right away.”
“Tomorrow will do. How about another drink?”
“I could manage.”
They were served, and he asked her what was new and interesting. “Nothing much,” she said. “Unless you call a visit from the Minister and Mrs. Pride interesting.”
“Oh my, your life here’s very exciting, isn’t it?” But then he smiled. “I happen to have a soft spot for old Mrs. Pride. I always thought that, if she had a parrot, it would say some shocking things.”
She laughed. “You may be right. For instance, she told me Pompey’s tea would put hair on my chest.”
“That’s only for starters. I’ve heard her say things that would … well, that you wouldn’t believe.”
“She’s rather far gone these days, I fear.”
“You mean out of it. Yes, I know.”
“For one thing, she instructed me that Aunt Vicky had left me a fortune.”
“Ah so?”
“I thought, of course, she meant the house. No, she insisted. I’m an heiress. Something about fifty thousand dollars, maybe more.”
“In a piggy bank?”
“I said, ‘Under the floor boards?’ And she scorned that, said Aunt Vicky wouldn’t be so nonsensical. She’s under the impression that there’s money somewhere, holed up in that house. In a “reticule,” or some similar place.”
“A reticule! The old dear …”
“Yes, she is, rather, but Pompey sent her home without dinner. I could have cried.”
“I see his point, in all truth. So you’ve been left a fortune.”
“According to Mrs. Pride.”
“I can’t quite see Victoria Brand depositing money in a Swiss bank, can you?”
“No. Or hiding it in a reticule either. She was such a straightforward person. Mrs. Pride told me not to tell the others.”
“Meaning?”
“You and John. Mr. Bach. She doesn’t seem to dig Mr. Bach, she called him an old goat.”
“Well, he is, rather.”
“He’s a kindly old gentleman.”
“Kindly old gentlemen sometimes conceal wicked interiors.”
“You think he stole my fortune from my aunt?”
“He could have.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, scoffing.
“Lawyers have power of attorney. Most of them. Probably Jim Bach did too.”
“And now he’s gloating, like Silas Marner, over the fortune she left me?”
“Damn his eyes.”
“You’re rather a bit of fun,” she said.
“I was hoping you’d think so.”
“Oh, Douglas …”
“Where’d you get those eyes, and what color are they, anyway?”
“Do I have to listen to this malarkey?”
“It’s up to you, my dear.”
“I have you in my power, you know. You have no means of transportation back to the farm. I can leave you stranded, circling around in the arid desert, crying for water and seeing mirages. I could do that, you know.”
“You’d never be so cruel.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
“Have another drink.”
“I’ve had quite enough. I’ll drive you back now, I can’t bear to think of you going mad in the wilderness, poor thing. I’ve too kind a heart.”
‘I’ll nominate you for sainthood. But you won’t drive me back, not yet. I’m going to take you sightseeing.”
“Really? Where?”
“To a little undersized community where, would you believe it, two witches were burned, according to the quaint custom of the times, accused of poisoning the immortal souls of a couple of misbegotten girls who claimed themselves under the power of the Devil and pointed a finger at their schoolteachers, aged twenty and twenty-one, respectively. So there was an auto da fe in the public square. This was, you understand, in the century immediately before the one which precedes ours.”
“Do you mind if we don’t talk about it,” she said, shivering.
“Not at all. What’s left is peaceful enough. I discovered it only a couple of years ago. As a matter of fact it was John who told me about it; he’s the scholar, you know. It’s off the beaten track, and what I want to show you is a little churchyard that’s nearly three hundred years old. I go there at times when my psyche isn’t all it should be. How about it, or do you have more glamorous things to do?”
“Hardly. I’d love to see your little churchyard.” He paid the bill and they got in the car again, heading north. “It’s about sixteen miles away,” Doug said. He drove because it was easier, he pointed out, than giving directions. “How about lighting me a cigarette?”
She lit two and handed him one. “Tastes like your mouth,” he said, smiling sideways.
“How would you know?”
“My fertile imagination,” he answered and, smiling back, leaned an arm on the window, exhaling smoke. “Shall I put the radio on?”
“Not for me.”
“Not for me either. Talk is better.”
They chatted idly, sometimes discussing the problems of the day, sometimes reminiscing. Doug called himself an Ethical Humanist; she liked the sound of it. “Perhaps I am too,” she said, and he remarked that if it was so it was another thing they had in common.
“What other?” she asked.
“Our childhood,
after all.”
“Yes, of course, Douglas.”
“And a natural attachment for each other.”
“Do we have that too?”
He turned to her, gave her a long, serious look and said, “Yes, we do,” and then attended to the road again. There was a kind of vibration, to which she kindled, and she glanced at his handsome, browned face, his intelligent, alert eyes, and thought, Take it easy, just take it easy.
Was she falling in love with him?
They branched off at a picayune little railroad crossing, and came to a small church almost hidden behind shrubbery and tall elms. “Here we are,” Doug said, and parked the car. The quiet was intense, the only sounds those of nature: the rustling of trees, bird-songs, the tinkle of a cowbell. “Let’s get out,” Douglas said, and they padded over leafy ground. “We’ll go in and light a candle for Aunt Vick first, and then I’ll show you the old graves.”
The door was heavy and nail-studded, creaking open rustily, and then they stood in the gloom of an almost lightless interior. There were six narrow windows, three on either side of the little church in the wildwood, long and slender as needles, darkened and grimy with age. A small rose window accented the farther end, its jewel tones subdued by dust and neglect.
Yet there was a hushed, hallowed sense of respose and sanctuary about the tiny chapel. Pilgrims had knelt here, thanking God for release from tyranny; in the high, carved lectern a man of God had once thundered a message founded on the Gospel, and a small band of parishioners, forging their way in the New World, had sipped the wine and taten the wafer on their tongues. The figure of Christ on the Cross, primitive and writhing, seemed to be saying in the solemn stillness, “This peace I give unto you … not as the world giveth, give I unto you …”
“This is nice, isn’t it?” Douglas whispered, and led her forward to the rows of flickering candles. He fished in a pocket and drew forth some coins, which he dropped into a tin box, the sound reverberating in the stillness. Then he pulled out a taper for her. She lit it from one of the flickering candles. For my aunt, she thought, and Doug lit another. They stood and watched the new flames flaring and then went out again.
Into the afternoon beneficence, the birds twittering madly. “Come on, honey, let’s take a gander at the gravestones, they’re older than God.”
Dating back to the beginning of the country, they dotted the hillside. Long before the Declaration of Independence, in 1776, men and women and children had been interred here, laid in the ground to the sighs and cries and sobs of mourners. Headstones half-sunk in the earth, moldering flowers, overgrown grass. Here lies Fanny Hayes, born 1691, died 1749 …
An angel, in marble, wings spread. God rest her soul …
They sat quietly on an iron bench, painted white, listening to the sounds of nature, bird calls and leaves rustling. Douglas said, “I come here when I’m down, you know, down. It says something to me. That my life is only the continuation of what went on long before me. These people are my friends, and hell, a lot of them are probably my relatives. We’re an ingrown lot here.”
He bent toward her. “Don’t grieve,” he continued. “She was one of them too, and she handed down to us her own bit of history. Listen, Margo, she lived a good life, let’s hope ours will be as good.”
They walked on again, back to the car, and got in. “I just thought you’d like to see that,” Douglas said. “What we came from, why we’re alive today.” He put the car in gear and smiled, the smile that made her think of the boy’s smile of long ago.
“Now can we go some place lively?” he asked. “Have a drink, maybe two or three drinks?”
“Yes, Douglas.”
“Light me a cigarette, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, and they drove on, companionable, chatting idly, sons and daughters of the American Revolution. Here we are, she thought, in the twentieth century, with all that behind us. Humble, she looked out the window at the glory of the New World, of which she was part and parcel, a child of pioneers.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When she got home there were guests. Several women sitting sedately, and a murmur of voices. Pompey was presiding, very proper and polite, passing out little cakes on a silver tray. “Oh, Pompey, they look so delicious,” a voice said, and then Margo was spotted.
“Here you are,” someone cried, and she who had been away for so long recognized faces, grown older, but still recognizable. Women in whose kitchens she had once been given ginger snaps and chocolate chip cookies, and whose sons and daughters she had played with.
It was like a scene in a play; they sat there with their tea cups in their hands, wiping their fingers on tiny little squares of cambric. There was Mrs. John Ericson, whose son Sven had almost white eyelashes (there was a sizable contingent of Scandinavians in Cranford), Mrs. Gilbert Smythe, whose husband had sung tenor in the Methodist Church. The Minister’s wife was there too, as stout as he was lean, with feet that dangled just short of the floor.
Good and worthy women all, and they had brought offerings: currant jam, preserved peaches, home-made bread. Estimable women, welcoming her with open arms … but privately Margo would have preferred an insane chat with old Mrs. Pride. Respectability shone in their scrubbed faces, good will beamed from sympathetic eyes.
And curiosity.
Naturally.
What, for example, was she, Margo, going to do about the house? Or about anything, for that matter. After all, she was a foreigner, late of European climes. “All those years abroad,” one of the women said, leaning forward. “How does it feel to be back?”
“And doesn’t the house look lovely?” another of them asked. “Just the way it always was when she — ”
“Shush now,” a voice warned. “Margo doesn’t want to — ”
“And how are your dear parents, dear?”
“Do they know about your being left Brand House?”
“Won’t you come to church this Sunday? Matthew would be so happy.”
“There’s a supper on the twenty-third. And a Cake Fair next Friday. Outdoors, unless it rains, but we’re praying it won’t.”
They ate Pompey’s cakes, patted their mouths with their napkins, and at five promptly got up, in concert, to go. “Please come again,” Margo said. “Thank you so much for everything.”
“You’ll be all right?”
“Yes, of course.”
She saw them to their cars, looking after them, watching them drive away. She was unaccountably melancholy. Those women, with their tidy lives, they meant well, but somehow they had been upsetting. She wasn’t her Aunt Vicky, who had entertained countless gatherings such as the one this afternoon, letting the homely conversation go in one ear and out the other. She was only Margo, and somehow this afternoon, with the burgher’s wives, had been upsetting. They were on their way home, to their tidy houses and tidy kitchens, with their men returning from offices. “Hello, dear, how was your day?”
“Well, the children — ”
“Got something cold to drink? My tongue’s cleaving to the roof of my mouth …”
The sound of the lawn mower out back interrupted her reverie. As she rounded the side of the house she saw Ben Blough at the farther end of the lawn, using the hand machine for trimming around flower beds. He saw her and waved; otherwise she would have retreated.
“Hi, there,” he called, and she walked over to him.
“Aren’t you working rather late, Ben?”
“I work whenever I have the time,” he said. “There’s a lot to be done around this place. Maybe I won’t be able to get here for another day or two, so I do as much as I can when I can.”
He turned his back on her, smiling over his shoulder, and pushed the mower in the other direction. There was something almost hypnotic in the whirring of the machine, and the lithe movement of his panther body. She watched him; at the pear tree he turned, coming toward her again, gleaming sweat on his naked torso. If I could paint, I’d paint him, she thought, and suddenly heard h
is muttered curse.
“Goddamn bugger …”
He knelt, and bent to pick something up from the grass.
“What is it?” she asked, thinking that the meshes had hit a stone.
“Stupid goddamned frog.”
She saw the thin stream of blood, and the yellowish mucus, the writhing, dangling legs. It was a small frog, and Ben had gone over it with the mower.
Her stomach turned, she stifled a scream, darted forward with a hand on his arm. “Didn’t you see it?” she flung at him.
“I was looking at you,” he said insolently.
The half dead thing bled in his fingers, sending a trickle down his wrist. “It’s all right, I’ll finish it off,” he said, and dropped it. Picking up a good-sized rock, he raised his arm, aimed, and smashed down on the writhing creature.
“That did it,” he said.
She closed her eyes, dizzy, turned and walked away. In the distance, he snarled, “What was I supposed to do, leave it suffer?”
“It’s all right,” she said, over her shoulder. “You did the right thing.”
And he had. But she would never forget that brawny arm raised, the thud of the rock hitting skin and sinew. “Dinner will be ready soon,” Pompey said, as she walked into the kitchen; and then he had a good look at her face.
“What’s the matter, girl?”
“Nothing.”
“You don’t kid me. What’s the beef?”
“Ben ran over a frog. It’s all right, he finished it off.”
“Miss Margo, this is the country. Happens all the time. Things like that. Last week a little phoebe bird fell out of its nest. Something got at it, a cat, I suppose. Neck tore open. Nothing for me to do but put it out of its misery.”
“Yes, I know,” she said, and he sat her down and made her a cup of tea. It was good, strong tea, bracing enough, but she was thinking about victims, small, helpless creatures who had to be put out of their misery. Nature was so inexorable, she thought, and the little phoebe bird, waiting for an act of mercy …
Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances Page 89