Sunshine and Shadow

by Sharon

  Her hands were around his waist, her head tucked into his shoulder.

  "Are you crazy yet?"

  She still asked sometimes. When they'd left California, in his elation and self-doubt they'd made an agreement that if he became bored or restless they'd return, or return part of the time, or work something out.

  "Not crazy. Happy."

  When he experienced the infrequent itchy pangs of loss, when he missed briefly what he'd been, he took short trips back, pursuing business for two or three days or a week. Each time the old interests seemed more trite, and he was grateful to escape the synthetic excitement, the alienation of pleasing strangers, and the burned-out reality of the only form of success he'd understood all those years.

  Nothing he'd learned in his life had been a clue to what he'd needed to know in the country. It hadn't taught him how much grain to feed a fresh heifer, how to catch alfalfa in the bud to hold its protein, how to tell when the soil was in need of nitrogen, potassium, or lime.

  He'd had to become like a child, to see and touch and taste in a new way, and it had changed him. The pinched soul had become whole. He knew things he never might have known about the unexpected luxuries and complexities of country life. He'd seen how snow stays white on an open field and packs hard and trackless, how the coat of a newborn calf will steam in a cold barn, how the woods glimmer at night when you walk through them with the only light a jar of fireflies. He'd felt the wonderful softness of a Clydesdale muzzle. He'd learned the smell and heat of an applewood fire, and how woolen underclothes froze stiff on a winter wash line and entered the kitchen like giant gingerbread men. When he found himself in a barn of hungry calves and delivered feed to those bawling mouths, he knew what it was to feel important. He learned the romanticism of helping a woman alight from a buggy, and of eating dawn lamplit breakfasts of home-skimmed cream and homegrown grain. And Thoreau was right about the woodpile. It did warm you twice, the first time when you chopped it.

  There'd been life to learn in California, too, but never the time. There were the plays now, and the new creative satisfactions, strong, direct ones, discovering the slow dramatic cycles of growth and fertility by which the world was fed, discovering the texture of a warm and clever extended family. And, most deeply, he had the satisfaction of bringing their child into the world, and the anticipation of the sons and daughters who would follow.

  "We could have a small family," Susan had said. "Maybe seven."

  He looked at her. Her cheeks were soft, her eyes bright as sequins.

  "You missed the excitement this morning," she said. "They had a photographer out at Fanny's clicking pictures over the fence, and he got chased by the bull. Poor man, he got mixed up and thought he had our place and all he got was a half hour up a tree with a cameraful of Christ's overalls on the line." She winnowed her fingers through his hair. "I thought you said they'd forget about you if you were out of circulation for a while."

  "May it be soon. May my name be stricken from all obelisks and pylons."

  "From the entertainment section of The New York Times:..."

  "From the underside of the freeway overpass…"

  They admired a field planted in corn, and he was able to imagine it as it would become in another month, the light catching red-gold across the tassels, winking lower on the sleek hanks of corn silk—one strand for every kernel. Some of the rows—his rows—were crooked.

  "I'm not much of a farmer."

  She said, "For a writer, you're a pretty good farmer."

  Across the young stately rows were the scarecrows she'd made in the spring to surprise him, replicas of themselves embracing, hers dressed Amish. Then he kissed her, pulling her close, his hands gentle on her back, stroking up and down.

  Above them, a dense-crowned maple still held raindrops on its leaves. Tilting sunlight penetrated the glassy pearls that became prisms to create bright rainbow strands on the wooden fence, on the white gravel, on her face. Magically created from white lights, here was color at its purest, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet— colors richer and fuller than he usually saw them.

  He turned her face slightly to catch a many-colored ribbon over her soft mouth, and lowered his mouth to hers to sip the sun colors from her lips.

  She was redolent of sunshine and peaches. The scents nested in her hair, spiced her skin, made her kiss nectar, and he was lost in the enchantment of loving her. Tenderness ran through him, hot, honeyed, familiar, irrevocably strong, still startling in its wonder.

  He nuzzled the side of her face. "I didn't know happiness came in this color."

  She smiled up at him, hypnotized by the joy she had in him. In time she put a finger on his lower lip, and said softly, "I wish to feel you as close to me as my skirt would be wet."

  He gave her the kind of smile that made it hard for her to swallow and whispered a word or two into her hair that made it even harder.

  "In a waist-high cornfield," she answered. "As if I would."

  "One of my strange English practices."

  She dragged him back into the kiss, standing on her toes, arching into him, making him breathless. "A good many of which I like very much," she whispered.

  Smiling against her ear, he said, "Then how about the haymow?"

  She spun around laughing, tossing her kapp back at him, running toward the barn. He caught up to her and held her again, because it felt too good to stop. He rubbed his face in her hair, touched her parted lips with his, and then framed her face in his hands and just looked at her.

  Then they began to walk again, together. He lifted their clasped hands to kiss her fingers.

  High in the west the sun sparkled off the silver dart of a jetliner, and he looked at it and thought, Down here is one who got away.