Sunshine and Shadow

by Sharon

  He could see her as she had been, an eager, lively child with eyes full of hope as she knelt at dawn on a braided rug, lifting the nest. He started to go to her, but she shook her head and looked frightened.

  "Alan, you have to understand. It can't be. For us, it's like the birds. We nest with our own kind. I know—I think I know—that you want something less. But what you want is impossible."

  The fog began to penetrate his sweater, and he was chilled inside and out. "Why do you let them do that to you?"

  Anger shone in her nut-brown eyes. "There are no 'them' who make me do things."

  Something came into his chest, a gentle emotion, and it struck him that he was experiencing feeling, and that it was real, and now senses long dormant, unfamiliar, began to be kindled inside him. He was aware of the aged softness of the wood under his feet, the cool air on his face, the vibrant rhythm of his heartbeat. He wanted to be able to let her go, but his need was more potent than anything he had ever known. And it must have been the same for her, because the strength seemed to leave her suddenly, and she covered her face briefly with her hands and then ran back toward him, halting at the end of the bridge, her eyes wide and panicked.

  "What would you have done if I hadn't stopped you?" The words were forced from her. She turned away from him, clutching the handrail on the bridge. Her thoughts were poor, storm-tossed things, consumed in the wonder that his mouth had created in her.

  "I would have touched you, Susan, just kept touching you."

  "Then touch me," she whispered.

  A new, more violent flame seared his heart. Very gently, he said, "It isn't easy for me to touch you and stop."

  Helplessly, so softly he could barely hear her, she whispered again. "Do iv Quickly."

  He came behind her and buried his face in her fragrant curls while his arms came around her, dragging her back against the scorching hunger of his body. His hands parted the cloak, desperately seeking, and discovered the thin muslin cloth and her delicious warmth beneath. He felt her gasp as he covered her belly with slow erotic strokes, lightly contouring the taut flesh. Ruffling soft kisses along her hairline, below her ear, along the curve of her neck, he let his hands climb her body. With his fingers resting upon her quick-rising chest, his thumbs came gently to brush the sides of her breasts, making long, sensitive passages until he felt her skin grow hot. Her hair was a cloud of midnight on his mouth. He filled his palms with her breasts, softly kneading, entranced by the rapid patter of her heart.

  "I go halfway to heaven with you in my arms." His whisper was thick, fervid. "I want you so badly. If you don't want me in return, God knows what will happen to me."

  She pulled around then, in the shelter of his arms, and took his hands in hers, holding them to her throat. "I was in a field once when a tree was struck by lightning, and just before, the space around me was filled with crackling air, and I felt like I was one with it, and in that moment my soul seemed to dissolve and reappear, and I could feel life within every cell of my body. And that's how I feel when you touch me." She raised his warm, knowing hands to her lips and kissed them. "I don't know what I'm going to do," she whispered, and then left him, disappearing into the mist.

  But he remained there, and Dash found him an hour later, standing under the spreading boughs of an apple tree, holding an empty bird's nest.

  The mist thickened, and they quit working outside three hours early and shot interiors. Because none of those scenes involved her, Susan left, taking a new path along the stream toward the east gate.

  She saw a silver trailer parked under a willow. Lanky, muscular Dash lay in front, his bulk bowing out the aluminum frame of a web-work lawn chair. He appeared to be sleeping. His eyes were hidden under the brim of a battered Stetson.

  She tried to pass quietly, so as not to disturb him, but his slow drawl halted her.

  "Howdy." He pushed the Stetson up with one finger.

  "Howdy."

  "I'm just havin' me a little siesta. They let you escape for the day? Then how'd you like to set a spell? C'mon in."

  Inside, the trailer was built along massive lines, with size-and-a-half armchairs and a little extra headroom for the doors. One wall was covered with oil paintings of two beautiful Arabian stallions and a mare. Susan sat on a brown leather couch. Dash pushed buttons to turn on lights and to open the wall to cupboards and a refrigerator. She just stared.

  "This is where you live?"

  "Only while I'm making movies. I have a farm in Arizona. Look yonder. That's my family." Another section of wall opened to expose shelves of books and photographs.

  There were eight children, some of them of different races. All adopted, Dash explained. In one photograph he sat on a corral fence bear-hugging a grinning woman with straw in her hair. His wife. Beside that one was another photograph of a young cowboy, solid on a rearing palomino. Dash himself in his twenties, he said, when he was King of the West. The studio had picked him off the rodeo circuit.

  "Got my start in B movies."

  "Bee movies?"

  "Yup."

  She learned also that Dash had helped to pay for Alan's earliest movies. He had his ranch and didn't need to work, but he kept up the acting for the fun of it and to spend time with Alan, whom he'd known since Alan was knee-high to a steer.

  He held up a bottle. "How about a whiskey?" He laughed at her expression. "Nah, I'm pullin' your leg. I know little gals like you don't drink whiskey."

  "I'm not- so little."

  "Darlin', I got socks older than you are. Your religion got anything against soda pop?"

  "No. I've never had it, though. It's too expensive."

  "Splurge, then." He poured some into a glass and handed it to her. "It's on me."

  He sat on the arm of a chair and smiled at her. His expression was both tender and rueful, and she was afraid he might mention Alan, but he only said, "Tell you what. You're going to be in a movie, you'd better have a look at one."

  He worked briefly with a machine that was a box on a box with a screen—a television. A moving picture began to form on what had been vacant.

  Dawn on a prairie farm and a slim boy moves about his chores, hauling water buckets and scattering feed to chickens.

  She felt an immediate sense of recognition, and her first thought was that she owed that to her own farm background, but in a moment she realized more was familiar to her than the setting. The camera showed the handsome boy in close-up, the face bright and forbearing, half-quizzical, half-detached. The eyes were light blue-green.

  A pleasant something stirred inside her. "It's Alan, isn't it? Alan as a child! Was he a—what do you call it? A star?"

  "Susan, honey, a star ain't nothin' but a ball of hot gas floatin' in a vacuum."

  She strained forward, fascinated by this magic window that held Alan in it, partly formed, becoming himself. "He was blond then."

  "His hair's gotten darker over the years."

  The story was gripping, shocking her with its tenderness, its brutality. The boy loses his parents and is blinded when rustlers burn his home. Ill and dispirited, hardly alive, the orphan is taken in reluctantly by his uncle, a gruff, aging gunslinger played by Dash. First to reduce the boy's dependence on him, later out of concern, and finally out of love, with inventive humor and patience, the gunman teaches the boy to live with his handicap, to sustain himself, even to ride.

  "Is that Alan in the saddle?"

  "No. A stunt double. Insurance companies wouldn't let him ride. Poor kid wasn't even allowed to ride a bicycle."

  The blindness disturbed her. It was too real, especially in the end. Dash has been shot trying to protect the boy from one of his parents' killers, who has the mistaken belief that the boy can identify him. Despairing and alone, the child nurses the dying gunfighter. When he has done all he can, the boy goes outside and stands under a low red sun, gold-streaked hair falling over his forehead and in his eyes, some strands brushing the unblinking irises, the sun-tipped lashes darkening with tea
rs. All the world's sorrow was in that young face.

  Dash lived. The film ended. She kept the grief like a stone in her stomach.

  "How could he do that?"

  "Nobody understood it," Dash said. "Even most adult actors can't play blind. They want to stumble around like a stick with arms, knocking into furniture. And here Alan made it look so natural, dignified. I don't know how he did it. Genius, maybe, like they say."

  "I didn't mean the blindness. I meant the tears. How could he cry like that?"

  There was silence, made profound by the fresh absence of movie sound, and she turned from the dead screen to find Dash watching her, his expression friendly, even admiring. Yet she had the feeling he was holding something back.

  "His parents weren't the best there was… I guess he had a cry or two in him, saved up." Then, "I ain't too worried about you making your way around the movie world. You were raised on a farm. I got a feeling you'll know bullshit when you see it."

  Chapter 9

  On Sunday the preaching service was at the home of Susan's parents. For her those many hours of worship were filled with awe and reverence. She was whole, completed by God and her community, profoundly in harmony with things that could only be felt, not seen or explained. It was a mystery planted in her earliest memories, ripened throughout her life, brought to mature flower when she had requested her adult baptism with the traditional words: It is my desire to be at peace with God and the church. In the slow hymns, the sermons, the stretches of time spent kneeling in silent prayer on warm aromatic floors of polished hardwood, she round .strength and renewal. And even now, rest.

  By dusk more than fifty neighbors and relatives had gathered there for the evening meal. Susan had spent the afternoon at her own farm and returned to find her mother's kitchen cozily hectic and filled with her female relatives.

  Anna was putting glasses of milk on a tray. Aunt Mary was mashing potatoes, and a cloud of steam rose to her elbows. Fanny was arranging pickled beets on a plate. Off to one side, Grandma was in her rocker with Katie on her knee and Fanny's Lizbeth next to her, the girl's hands and tiny nose resting on the chair arm. Grandma's aged, yet still clever hands entertained the children, folding a handkerchief into twins in a hammock, into mice.

  Susan's mother was wending her way through the group of women, carrying a heavy enamel coffeepot. Her apron was wrapped around the handle, protecting her hands. She was an even-tempered woman, without big surprises, but with small, delightful ones. In last winter's cold snap, she had knitted red wool caps for the horses. She wasn't a disciplinarian, or a teacher except by example. There was no cunning in her, no competitiveness.

  There wasn't much to distract from the personality of an Amish woman; not the differences in dress, decoration, and habit that were precious to the English. Nothing outward separated one woman from another or severed the invisible thread that bound them in faith. Where everyone was the same in appearance, the nuances of each spirit were revealed rather than hidden.

  Susan hung on the edge of the scene, basking in it. After a week of the exotic, this was comforting. Here were things she knew, the big bowls for mixing, the wooden spoons for licking, the pathways worn in the varnish on the floor, from the front of the stove to the counter to the table. Here were the scents she'd grown up on: chicken in the oven, corn boiling above, allspice from the mincemeat, cinnamon from the orange cake, molasses from the taffy.

  The bonnets and swaying skirts and cooking scents were part of a life she loved all the more as she spent time away from it. She wished to be folded into the scene as if it were a thick quilt on a cold winter night, then to fall into a deep, protected sleep.

  Come winter, this was the warmest room. You could soak in its heat, and it would stay right in your bones. You could set your coat and boots by the stove so they'd be toasty-warm around you when you went out. Tonight she needed that.

  She reached a finger into the mashed potatoes as she walked by, and Aunt Mary tried to bat her hand away. She nipped a slice of pickled beet from Fanny's carefully arranged platter, causing her friend to grin and wave her fork indignantly. Then she picked up a chocolate cake, platter and all, and made a show of making off with it. Amid laughter and commotion, she was surrounded by cousins trying to get the cake back, and by Carolyn and Anna flocking to the rescue.

  "Susan must be here," said Grandma, shaking her head and smiling, rocking faster.

  "It's me, Grandma." She hoisted the platter over, her head. "And I've got the chocolate cake. You and I and the little ones are going to carry it off to eat it."

  . "That's what the commotion is about," said Grandma. Smile lines wrinkled the corners of her eyes. Wisps of white hair curled out from her kapp. "You're up to your tricks."

  Susan surrendered the cake with a precarious swoop that had them all gasping, and pulled up a kitchen chair close to her grandmother. She took hold of the gnarled old hands and rested their clasped hands on her grandma's knees. Touch had become more important to her grandmother, with her sight gone.

  "Here we thought that when school let out we'd have you with us more, but it turns out we've got you less." Her grandmother's smile held the richness and subtlety of a lifetime of memories. "It's something, the way you keep yourself busy. You don't have to help with spring planting like your little scholars do."

  "You've sure had no time to dopple, Susan," her mother agreed. "Esther's Joshua saw you out Wednesday night hanging wash by flashlight."

  "It was only ten-thirty. Anyway, I was out of bleach and didn't dare put it but by day. Not with Fanny up the road and her sheets so white. She shows me up something fierce."

  "Such a one you are!" Grandma said. "You'll get too tired out!"

  "It was a wonderful night for shooting stars, Grandma. Do you mind how we always watched the stars together?"

  "Why, sure, I do." Grandma's voice had a soft, dry rustle like pages of an old, much-loved letter. "That was back when we shared a room after Grandpa died. Most nights you'd wait up until I came to bed. I'd come into the room and see your little eyes shining in the dark, and your head would pop right up. We'd sit by the window together and look at those stars."

  "We used to talk about everything."

  "Yes, we did. One time, after we was done talking, you were quiet for a minute, looking at the sky, and you said, 'Grandma, I wish I were a star and could shine on the world.'"

  That night came back to her. Grandma could so easily bring a memory from the past into the present: the deep blackness of the sky, the stars like heavy silver dust, and above all the feelings of that moment, the yearning, the smallness of the body, the largeness of the wish, the growing of the mind.

  "That's one thing I won't do, get too busy to look at the stars," Susan said. Then, to Fanny, "What's there on your arm?"

  Fanny pulled up her sleeve. "Stung my arm with a couple of wasps. We've got a mess of wasps under the corncrib."

  "Those are bad ones." Susan's mother bent over the afflicted arm. "Wasps have a case on you girls. This is the fourth year in a row one or the other of you got stung."

  "That was the best time I had last year," Fanny said to Susan, "the day you and I got chased by hornets out on the melon patch. There you were, tearing off with a gunny sack of melons on your back. Pretty soon goes the sack flying and there's melons smashed everywhere, and I couldn't walk for laughing..."

  "So you sat down and ate yourself full," Susan's mother said. "I remember that, you out-to-here pregnant at the time. What a pair."

  "I haven't been able to look a melon in the face since," Susan said.

  "Do you work much longer, Susan?" The question came from Edna, John's mother.

  "No, just part—another four, five weeks."

  "You're not the only one from the church working over to Greyling now, did you know? There's Sadie Yoder, too. Seth's driving her. She's out on Third Street a little piece, cleaning house and watching kids for an English family."

  Anna was bending over the chicken in front
of the open oven. She said over her shoulder, "Does she like it?"

  "She likes it fine, but she wouldn't want to be at it long. She says they eat their supper in front of the television and watch it so they don't hardly visit with each other. She says it gets her disturbed, some of the things they watch. She has to go in another room."

  Different ones shook their heads, feeling sorry for the English having to watch that horrible box. But Susan had seen another side of that box: a rich and compelling story with Alan as a child. She wanted to tell them. It gave her a feeling of unutterable loneliness not to be able to do so. The Tightness of the day faded.

  "You're working up to the old buildings, I hear, Susan," her cousin Priscilla said. "In the coach-house kitchens, I suppose?"

  She felt hateful to deceive them, just hateful. The outright lie would not come. "I do this and that, whatever they need."

  "You don't see those from California, though, do you?"

  "They're around. I don't let it concern me. They keep themselves pretty busy." The half-truths were bitter on her tongue.

  "I imagine they do," her mother said, looking as if she could barely imagine them at all, much less imagine their doing anything.

  "There was a big write-up in this week's Greyling paper about that one that's head of it all, that one, what do they call him… Mr. Wolf—"

  "Wilde."

  "It was wrote up how he went to some swell university, and how he's had books written about him, and how he's traveled to far-off places and won all these honors, and I don't know what all," Priscilla said.

  "He must be real interesting to talk to," her mother said.

  Priscilla got a smile on her face that made Susan wonder if she had been reading those grocery-store magazines Daniel had mentioned.