by Sharon
"You have to separate them afterward, or half the time they get into a fight."
"There's one thing the species have in common."
He got back a lopsided grin that reminded him a lot more of Holden Caulfield than John-boy Walton. As the boy sat down on the sun-speckled floorboards of the shed with the rabbit on his lap. "How'd you like to hold one? Pick one out."
Alan was not especially fond of cute things with far, but for some crazy reason he wasn't averse to these rabbits. He glanced down the row of hutches, at white-and-black-spotted rabbits, and then went to a cage that held a small rabbit sitting hunched down in the fluff of a sleek chocolate-brown coat. Instead of having ears that poked up like a Beatrix Potter bunny; this rabbit's ears hung downward, giving his bright little face a doleful air.
"What's the matter with his ears?"
"Nothing. It's in his breeding to be lop-eared. His ears are fine. It's the other parts of him that give me trouble. Go on, take him out. He's very gentle."
Alan gingerly withdrew the rabbit. "What's the trouble, then?"
"I've got to cull him." The boy glanced up as Daniel entered the shed with Carolyn on his shoulders, bending under the low doorway.
Daniel swung the child to the floor. "You haven't had any luck with the Lop?"
"It's hopeless."
Wilde made himself comfortable on the clean floorboards and set the Lop on his knees. "What's so hopeless about him?"
"He took sick the first week I had him, and Anna brought him into the house to nurse him. She litter-trained him, and he got to be kind of a pet. Maybe it was the babying, maybe it was being sick, but when I brought him back out…" Luke shrugged. "He won't cover a doe."
Alan watched the rabbit drop its chin and gaze up at him in a woebegone manner. The glum expression had to be rank anthropomorphism and a trick of the preposterous ears. The thing looked like a basset hound. "What does 'cull' mean?"
"Rabbit stew."
"You intend to eat this bunny?"
"Not me. I'm too attached. I'm going to sell him to the Zooks, down the way, and they'll, er…" Luke settled his spotted rabbit back in its hutch. "The thing is, you'd like to take pity, but on a farm you can't be feeding animals who don't earn their keep, or pretty soon you'll find yourself out of business. He's either breeding stock or stew."
Daniel hunkered down beside Alan and scratched the Lop behind the ears with some expertise. "Have you tried switching him cage to cage with a doe?"
"Time after time. Nothing."
"Have you. tried setting him on her back?"
"He climbs off and sits in the corner."
"Are you sure he's a male?"
Luke gave his older brother a look that was heavily sardonic.
Daniel took his hand off the rabbit. "No help for it, then."
"Are you sure you don't want to think this over?" Alan said. "Impotence shouldn't be a capital offense."
Alan's voice filtered out the uncovered window to Susan and Joan as they strolled through the sunlight toward the shed. Joan leaned closer, on the verge of laughter, and spoke sotto voce. "What on earth do you think he's talking about?"
"One of Luke's rabbits, I guess." Susan felt her own smile fluttering upward from deep within. "Have you ever noticed? It's so funny, the way Alan is with children."
"Are you kidding? We see it all the time when he works with child actors. It's a total stitch. He's wonderful. He absolutely doesn't adapt."
"I know. He talks to children as though they were adults. He doesn't seem to have the first idea he's doing it, either. It's so…" A strand from Susan's kapp veered in the breeze, rubbing the side of her neck. She swept it aside with her finger. "It's so charming. He has such patience. He'll be a wonderful father."
"If the thought ever occurs to him to become one."
"Why wouldn't it?"
"Because that's not the image Alan has of Alan."
From the shed, Susan heard her little sister's voice. "You should have him, Mr. Wilde. He'd be good company to you."
Resting her elbows on the sill, she was in time to see Alan with an armful of rabbit, and the admonition she'd prepared for Carolyn, to tell her not to tease Mr. Wilde because he didn't like animals, became a forgotten echo. He was holding the tiny buck improperly, his grasp rather awkward, as though he couldn't figure out the logical way to support the plump belly and dangling legs. But even in his inexperience his grip was trying to accommodate it with a tentative gentleness.
He wants to be more than be is. He wants so much more.
Susan saw him shake his head at her sister, smiling a little, handing the rabbit back to Luke, tactfully rejecting. Luke's endorsement of the offer. Alan looked different today, in jeans and a loose cotton shirt, nearer to simple, less confined in elegance. He looked, for once, like someone who could get dirty. Darned if she wasn't going to try.
And it became swiftly apparent to her that he was willing. For one thing, he let Luke talk him into learning how to milk.
He was something to see, with his long, well-made proportions folded up on a milking stool under a huge Holstein, half a dozen cats coiled expectantly around his ankles.
"Does she kick?"
"She never kicks," Luke splashed out the sudsy water he'd used to wash the Holstein's udder. The scent of the foamy soap mingled in the barn with that of wet cow and alfalfa. "Unless you put cold hands on her bag in the winter. Tell you what, Alan. You won't get far that way. You've got to take a good hold on her tits, like I told you."
To the interest of his large, encouraging audience, Alan made a better showing, though he said, "I thought they were called teats."
Studying Alan's shaky technique, Luke said, "Nah. Just call 'em tits."
Incredulous delight seized Susan when she saw Alan's color fluctuate. "Please, Luke, you're making Mr. Wilde blush."
"I've led a sheltered life," Alan said meekly, and then looked up at her with a direct smile. She felt her own color rise.
"He has." Joan stood to the lee of the stanchion, her arms full of cat, with the cow's head in the manger at her feet, placidly chewing, chewing. "Thirty-two years of age and I'll bet he's never been in a K-Mart."
"What's a K-Mart?" said Alan and Susan almost simultaneously. Joan's answering smile was full of mystery.
Luke bent down, giving Alan a bracing nudge. "There you are. Getting a nice rhythm on her"—he grinned—"how about we call it her bosom?"
Clever, cosmopolitan, and hardly sheltered, Alan gazed at the healthy pink flesh squeezed between his fingers. "Please. My sensibilities."
Afterward they walked and sat down by the creek, Susan and Alan, Joan and Daniel, under the cool awning of an oak. Nearby, Anna had her feet in the water while she made Joan a maple-leaf crown, overlapping leaves and using the stems to pin them together. They could see in the distance a haze from disc plows, and the spring leaves were a mist in many shades or green. A robin was singing somewhere, an afternoon melody that became part or the air. The children searched for gelatinous strands of frog eggs in the cattails, their feet wavering images under the clear stream. Carolyn lay on her stomach on a warm flat rock, blowing bubbles in the water through a dandelion stem. Far off in the hedgerow, Jacob and Mark were collecting asparagus in a reed basket, small figures under a stretching sky. The sun's rays were slanting in, moving across the landscape like golden fingers caressing the earth.
Alan lay against a fallen black oak, one knee bent, one arm resting on the dark trunk. Susan watched him uncover an oblong of soil under the rich mixture of leaf litter, scooping up a handful to study. He didn't sniff it, as a farmer would have. It wouldn't be his instinct, and yet there was something in his half-experience that frustrated her. Smell it, she thought, sending the message with her eyes even though he wasn't looking at her. Smell it. When he did not, she stood and went over to kneel beside him, pushing his wrist upward so the soil was near his face.
"Does it smell good to you?" she asked.
His expression was
curious as he thought it over. He's deciding what I want to hear, she thought. "Be honest. How is it?"
His eyes took in light as though he'd caught her thought. "Like dead leaves."
She sat up on the log. "I remember when this oak fell. It came down one year in a spring windstorm, and I saw it the next day when I was walking with my grandmother. There it lay, the roots ripped from the ground, some of them clutching rocks as if they'd tried to cling there. And I said to my grandmother, 'Poor tree.' And she said, no, the tree was just coming home. Running her hand over the fissured bark, over the spring frosting of bright moss, she found a soft place in the wood where the timber had become red ocher meal. Leaning forward, she showed him, and then showed him too how the same deep red dust was in the scattered bits of soil in his hand. 'See,' she told me. 'See how nature takes back the trees.'"
Tomorrow… Things that would one day pass away… She could feel his resistance to the idea. Like the images he captured, frozen in his films, he lived in a present that he willed to be eternal. What did it matter, to cling so hard to this world, when the next one would be so much better? But she knew without being told that Alan didn't believe in better worlds. If you can hardly see the virtues in this life, it must be impossible to imagine the perfection of a future one. She wanted to take off his blinders and let him see.
Tilting her hand above his, she let the red wood spill from her palm to his and watched him close his fingers slowly around it. He wants to touch me. So strong was the impression that it caught like a trapped breath in her throat.
He never made the move she could feel he so desired. Aware as he was that they were not alone, he stared at his hand for a brief time before glancing up and around and finally smiling into her face.
"Does this little creek have a name?"
"Government Crick."
"Why do you call it that?"
"I don't know. That's just what they call it."
"Susan, you know better than that," Daniel said. "You know. It's Government Crick because it goes by Government Tree."
"Oh, yes, I didn't think about it." To Alan, "Far down the crick there, see the giant elder tree that stands against the sky? Hereabout, they call that the Government Tree."
"Is that just what they call it?" Alan's smile teased.
At moments like this, she wondered if in a hundred years there'd ever be a way to become immune to that smile. "The old folks say they call it the Government Tree because every branch is crooked."
"Social comment." There was a thread of laughter in his voice. "I'm horrified."
Anna stared at him. She appeared to be caught up in his wayward charm, the aura that was gentle and slightly dissipated. "Do you put social comment in your movies, Mr. Wilde?"
"It shows up as a subtext. The reviewers think so anyway, even when you try to be consciously apolitical."
Anna twirled a leaf by the stem. "What's a subtext?"
"A message. A philosophy. The thing you say while you're pretending to say something else. Take a soft-drink ad. They show you a group of people, young, beautiful, having a great time, drinking from these cans of carbonated chemicals. The surface message is that the stuff tastes good. The subtext is that if you drink the stuff you'll be young, beautiful, and have a million friends. You look doubtful. You don't believe it?"
Anna was grinning. "No one could be that stupid, to think that drinking some kind of soda pop would do all that."
"True. That's why you can't tell them directly. You have to pin it underneath."
"And what's the philosophy you pin under your stories?" Susan began to brush the wool dust from her palm.
"That life is like a war where you don't get any medals."
"What a thing to say!" He'd meant to provoke her, and she knew it. Laughing as much about his unruly intellect as she was at his words, she whipped off Daniel's hat and stuck it on Alan's head, then pulled it down over his face. "Too bad you aren't Amish, We'd fix you up quick."
"Fix him up anyway." Joan tossed over the jacket Daniel had discarded on a low branch. "Let's see what he'd look like Amish."
So Susan pushed Alan to the ground, stuffing him into the jacket, making him laugh, making the children laugh. He made it hard for her, too, struggling enough to prolong the contact between them, and she wanted him to, taking guilty pleasure in each touch, each unguarded brush of his body against her hands and arms. Charming to her in the hat, the jacket, she imagined him Amish, how he'd be so good-looking and vital, how he'd wait for her under the moonlight in a buggy and she would run outside after milking and ride with him. What riches she would have had then.
She hopped to her feet, pacing quickly backward to see if he was going to chase her to retaliate. She saw he was, and ran from him, letting him catch only the trail of her mirth as she plunged toward the stream and into the water.
"A creek race!" the kids shouted, bounding after her, and then it was all of them and Alan, too, racing along the creek bed in cool, crisp water halfway knee-high, laughing at the bristling silliness of it. The creek became vast splashes, silver curtains that surrounded them as they ran with the current under willow boughs that grazed their bodies with wet, glossy leaves as they passed. A pasture of Holstein heifers stared at them in astonishment and then bolted away through a woodland carpeted in the curled furry heads of infant ferns.
They threw themselves down to rest on the grass near the schoolhouse, letting the sun paint dry spots on their clothing. Susan made the outline of a smile on Alan's shirt with sandburrs.
Strolling along the shoreline, Alan picked up a sharp stone, and when they looked it over and said yes, it was an Indian arrowhead, he examined it as though a childhood dream had come real for him.
They had stick races on the culvert, tossing twigs off one side, watching the other side to see whose twig the water carried through first.
"Funny idea," Alan said.
"We borrowed it from Winnie-the-Pooh," Susan told him. "When I was little we used to do Winnie-the-Pooh things."
"Such as?"
"We used to be the Pooh Corner animals. Anna was a little chubby, so she was Piglet. Luke was Tigger, always bouncing. Daniel was Christopher Robin, because we went to him when things went wrong."
"Your sister Rachel?" His soft voice became softer. He wasn't aware, of course, only perhaps that something was terribly awry here, a blank mark of sorrow in her family. It was soothing in a very intimate way to hear him speak openly about her sister, making her real again.
"Rachel was Owl, since she loved to use big worlds, but she usually said them wrong."
Alan gave her kapp string a tug. "I'll bet you were Pooh Bear."
"As a matter of fact, I was. You know how Pooh had adventures and then made a poem about them? I made up poems about the things we did. Sometimes I made up a Hum. Then you can hum the words, and every line ends with Tiddly Pom. Now, what on earth have I said to set you off laughing like that?"
"I don't know." He could hardly say the words, he was so wrapped up in his laughter. "I don't know. It's being with you."
The visitors from California were a lot scruffier than they'd been when the day began, Joan with a laurel of maple leaves and Alan's damp jeans finding the shape of his long, handsome legs.
In the fading daylight, they played Auntie-I-Over around the schoolhouse, teaching Joan and Alan the simple rules: two teams, one on either side of the school; one team threw the ball over the roof. The other team members tried to catch it, and if they succeeded, they could dart around the building and try to tag out those on the other team. Susan remembered Rachel's saying that it was a dying game because there were so few country schools left and in the city the schools were too big, and that was sad. Her grandmother had played it as a girl and recalled the fun of it, the excitement of the ball rumbling over the shingles, of not knowing when it was coming or where it would appear. And there was no way to know if the other team had caught it and was sneaking around the corner silently to burst out into the open a
nd chase you while you ran screaming.
Alan, as captain of the other team, proved to be a subtle and crafty strategist, full of spunk and derring-do. And gallantry, too, Susan discovered, watching him give chase to Carolyn, seeing Alan pretend she was too fast for him, seeing her sister's delight.
The setting sun poured fiery reds over them, a translucent glow that rose in a sky streaked with bold crimson and delicate pinks. Hurtling around the corner, trying to nab Luke, she ran smack into Alan.
He steadied her. The others ran on, and they were briefly alone. Smiling, she tried to pull loose, but he held her hard against his body.
"For a minute. Please."
Her smile was gone, forgotten in the stress of feeling all of him pressed to her. The sounds of exuberant play became distant, and she heard nothing beyond the unsettled patter of her breath. Sunset tinted him, gold on his skin, red-gold in his hair, warm tones, coming warm inside her, then shudderingly warm as his hands on her back made her closer in clever ways. His clothing carried to her the scents of the meadow and the golden sunlight, and beneath, his body was solid and delicious. So male. And she needed that so.
The door he had opened for her would not close again, and the wanting came not as a shower, but in a storm, and if there was resistance in her, this time it was helpless. Her passion came in a clear voice, hiding nothing. She wanted him, wanted to be under him, to feel the goodness of him, with his thighs making a cradle against hers, his chest in a caress against her breasts. She needed him to take her mouth in long, melting kisses and come inside her and ease this intense, angry aching. Graphic and controlled, unexpected, the thoughts flooded from the depths of her with such speed that she could not stop herself from yearning against him, tightening the contact, her mouth dry, merciless desire grabbing at her throat.
How was this happening?
He held her close to him for another moment and then she was gently released. She wondered if he could see that she had begun to tremble. The failing light shadowed the expression in his eyes as he said, "Let's do something wonderful and write a poem about it." The corners of his mouth tucked in a charming smile. He walked his fingers lightly up her arm. "Tiddly pom?" Then, with great gentleness, "Don't be ashamed, Susan. It's good."