Summer Lightning

by Cynthia Bailey Pratt

  “You mean she won’t marry me because her duty is to see me married to one of the others.”

  “Right at last.”

  “Then what am I to do?” I sound as frustrated as I feel, Jeff thought with a growl.

  “Well,” Sam said, “for tonight . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Tonight you sleep in the parlor.” Suddenly, Sam hurled one of the pillows at him. Before he could pick it up, Sam had turned down the lamp and rolled over, producing a raucous snore,

  “You’re my father and I love you, but I’ve got to tell you . . . you’re one lousy actor, Dad.”

  Leaving, he pretended not to notice the second pillow his father shied at his head. He went to find, as best he could, sleep on the parlor settee. Between the torments of passion and horsehair, he stole little rest. Dawn found him heavy-eyed and grumpy, not at all Edith’s eager, yet patient, lover that he had planned to be at their next meeting.

  Chapter 15

  The rain continued. Until dawn and beyond. The little girls moped listlessly, for it was far too wet to go out. Sam shooed them out of the kitchen, where he was trying to get a cake to rise against its will.

  Edith hadn’t seen Jeff. He was gone before she’d come down to breakfast after a restless sleep. She wanted to go into town to talk to Miss Climson. Sam, however, was too busy cursing like a sailor to be interrupted, and she hadn’t the right boots for walking. Besides, the road was most likely nothing but mud by now.

  Entering the parlor, she saw Maribel on the floor, jumping her toy sheep over a wall made of blocks. Louise sat in the window, her chin propped on her hand, heaving heavy sighs at regular intervals. The air was close, sticky with humidity, and Grouchy added the strong fragrance of wet dog.

  “What are you doing?” Edith said, crouching down next to Maribel, She checked carefully for snakes and other creepy things before she did so, however. She felt that being in the house was no protection.

  “Baa, baa,” said Maribel. “I’m a sheepdog.”

  From the window Louise said in a bored tone, “Sheep dogs don’t baa. Dogs bark. Woof-woof, like that.”

  “They do so baa!”

  “Do not!”

  Edith put her hand on Maribel’s shoulder to keep the little girl from flying at her sister. “Maybe the sheep is half a dog. That would make him a sheep-dog. Or a dog-sheep.”

  Maribel giggled and said, “Baa-baa. Woof!” She bounced the sheep over the carpet, making him come down on his little black legs and bound once more into the air.

  “Baa-woof!” Edith said. “Or, if you prefer, woof-baa!”

  Grouchy woofed, tilting his head at their nonsense, but thumping his tail good-naturedly.

  Louise shook her head and stared at the drizzling sky, “Some people are too silly. . . .”

  Edith and Maribel played for a few minutes. The child seemed to take it as a matter of course for the grown woman to kneel beside her on the carpet. Yet Edith remembered how her aunt would stand above her as she played, a grim tower in her straight smooth skirts, the only friendly sight Edith’s own face reflected in her aunt’s polished, high button shoes.

  Before long, Louise turned her attention from the outside to the action beside her. In a moment, she too was sitting cross-legged on the carpet, reaching for the blocks, saying, “Not like that . . . like this. Put them on top of each other.”

  The back door slammed, shaking the windows. “That’s Gran’pa,” Maribel said, not looking up.

  “He’s gone to throw the cake to the pigs,” Louise added. “I ‘spect that baking powder wasn’t any good. He should of stuck to Borsun’s and not try any new stuff. Gran’ma only used Borsun’s.”

  “You remember your grandmother?”

  “Oh, sure,” Louise said.

  “Oh, sure,” her sister parroted, nodding briskly.

  “You do not! I remember Grandma and Mama and you don’t remember nobody.”

  “Yes, I do! Mama was pretty.”

  “Daddy told you that. You don’t remember her.” Louise looked up at Edith. “She was pretty with green eyes and long silvery hair. I remember her brushing and brushing it, a hun’ert strokes. Sometimes she’d let me brush it. Daddy cried for three days when she went to Heaven.”

  “Daddy cried . . . ,” Maribel said like an echo, though her baby face was bewildered.

  “You must miss her very much,” Edith said to both girls.

  “Not so much anymore,” Louise answered matter-of-factly. “That’s a long time ago. I’m eight now . . . I was a baby then, like Maribel is now. Daddy still misses her, I guess. Well, being married . . . you know.”

  “Oh, yes. I see.” Obviously Jeff had not yet gotten over the death of his beloved wife. His attraction to herself was merely an attempt to distract her from the performance of a duty he no longer wished her to complete. Naturally, he wouldn’t come right out and admit that, not after all the bother he’d been put to in order to get her here. Yet Edith remained steadfast.

  These children needed a mother. Even she, a spinster, was fairly itching to run an iron over the girls’ wrinkled pinafores. She wanted to banish the wary look in Louise’s eyes forever. And the sweet, trusting way that Maribel rested in the curve of her arm awoke some maternal sense she hadn’t even suspected she had.

  Edith felt sure Jeff would come to love whomever he married—in time. It might be far from perfect at first, yet his kisses proved that he was ready for at least part of marriage. She did not imagine that with his loving heart he could spend any time in company with a wife without offering her affection. Then he would initiate his wife into those mysteries of marriage that wives and husbands never discussed with anyone but each other,

  Edith thought about this future wife. For some reason, this woman refused to take on the appearance of either Miss Climson or Miss Albans. Surely this faceless someone must be happy with such a wonderful husband. Jeff was startlingly handsome. Edith knew how kind he was firsthand. He was prosperous, generous, and physically as well-proportioned as any Greek statue.

  Shifting a little on the carpet, Edith tried to focus on Jeff’s other good qualities but kept returning to contemplation of the splendid physique that had been revealed while she was recovering from being frightened by the dead snake.

  How smooth his body had looked, gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. Her fingers curled into her palm as she recalled how his chest had been so firm and hard when her fingers brushed over it. The sunlight had picked out the gold glint of the hair that spread across the division of his chest muscles. With her mind’s eye, she followed the trailing line over his Hat stomach and down into the waistband of his jeans. Licking her lips unconsciously, she found herself wondering what existed behind those silver-toned buttons. If a man’s body was so different from her own in so many ways, how else might it differ?

  “Is she okay?” Maribel asked Louise in a whisper. “Her face is all red.”

  Edith realized she’d closed her eyes. “Yes, I’m fine,” she said, snapping them open. “I’m just not used to sitting on the floor. I think my legs . . . limbs have fallen asleep.”

  She stood up, exaggerating her stiffness. She thought savagely, In future, my imagination had better feed off fiction alone!

  “Come here, my dears,” she said, seating herself on the window seat. The air off the glass felt deliciously cool on her hot cheeks. “I’ll tell you a story, if you like.”

  “What story?” Maribel pulled herself up onto Edith’s lap with a grasp of her full skirt.

  “Is it from the Bible?” Louise asked, her eyes narrowing suspiciously.

  “Don’t you like Bible stories?”

  “They’re all right. I like the ones in Daniel, like Neb . . . Nebu-can-sneezer’s dreams. But . . .”

  “But what?” Edith asked.

  “Well, nobody will tell me what ‘beget’ means. Al . . . someone says it means ‘found’ but why were all those people lost?”

  Edith recalled being sent to bed wit
hout supper for wanting to know how she should begat, since her aunt told her to always behave as the Bible instructed. “Begat just means father. One man is father to another man, so they say, A begat B.”

  “Oh, I see. Quicker.”

  “That’s right. You see, a long time ago, people didn’t have printing presses and lots of people to do work like printing a Bible. So the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelations was written out by hand.”

  “Golly,” Louise said, impressed. “I had to write a twenty-five-word essay last spring and it almost killed me.”

  “And every word had to be right. So they used some shorter words like ‘begat’ instead of ‘father of again and again.”

  “I can print,” Maribel stuck in. “I can print real good.”

  “You cannot,” Louise said automatically. “Only the first couple of letters in the alphabet. I can print them all. I can do script too, some.”

  Maribel’s lower lip began to quiver. “Can too print. A—B —C. And G too.”

  Edith’s arm tightened around the little girl’s shoulders. “That’s a lot,” she said. “Before I go, I’ll help you with some of the others. You’ve got all the hard ones already. Can you say the whole alphabet? Let’s do it together.”

  “What about the story?” Louise wanted to know.

  “Alphabet first, story after.”

  She told them a shortened version of Ivanhoe. Then she told them about Lochinvar and even recited some of Scott’s narrative poem. To her amazement, Louise repeated the lines back to her although half an hour had passed since she heard them. After the children pleaded for one more story, Edith described some of the adventures ol’ Robin Hood, whom she’d mentioned during Ivanhoe. Her throat was sore by then, and she was glad when Sam announced lunch, even if without cake.

  Jeff came in late, and dropped down into the chair next to her without speaking. His sleeves and shirt were wet and molded to his form. Crystal droplets hung in his light hair. He pushed back a damp hank that hung in his eyes. Edith had to force her gaze away from him.

  After helping Maribel reach the jam, Edith asked, “Jeff, you said something about church today?”

  “Tonight,” Sam answered after a little silence. “Wednesday evenings Mr. Armstrong runs a prayer meeting. They’re so popular a couple of the other churches have started them.”

  “So Mr. Armstrong isn’t the only . . . ?”

  “Lord no,” Louise said. Under her father and grandfather’s austere glances, the little girl hastily apologized. “Sorry, Cousin Edith, I spoke without thinking.”

  “That’s all right.” How had her aunt reacted to Edith’s taking the Lord’s name in vain? She didn’t want to recall the coldness she’d had to endure. Her aunt had never struck her. She’d never needed to. A simple “I see” could raise welts.

  “In about the last five or six years, we’ve had a couple of new churches start up. There’s even one for the black folks, those that don’t go where their white families go. For a while there, the churches looked like they were going to get awful competitive, but they straightened out their territories. God help any new families who come to town, however.”

  “You make it sound like competing businesses.”

  “Isn’t it?” Jeff said, lifting a fork to his mouth.

  “We don’t go to church much,” Louise volunteered.

  “I like the singing,” her sister put in, and began to warble “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” softly but very clearly.

  Jeff looked sheepish. “We go,” he said. “Sometimes.”

  “I see,” Edith said.

  “When we want to,” he responded, glancing at her with a rising anger in his eyes.

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “I’m not explaining. I’m telling you we go to church when we feel like it. But if it’s Sunday and the sun is shining, I think there’s better ways for children to learn about God than sitting in a pew!”

  “I spent every Sunday in a pew,” Edith said. She sipped from her glass of cloudy lemonade. Then she raised her eyes to his angry ones and said simply, “I agree with you.”

  “Oh.” Jeff took another bite of chicken. “Oh.”

  “Why are they arguing?” Maribel whispered to Louise.

  “I don’t know.” Louise turned to Sam. “Why are Cousin Edith and Daddy arguing?”

  “‘Cause they like each other would he my guess.”

  The little girls nodded, obviously approving of this answer.

  Edith colored. Jeff kept on eating, only the burning tips of his ears giving away his emotions. “Really good chicken, Dad,” he said in a few minutes.

  “Excellent,” Edith said. “I can’t remember when I had better. And there’s so much of it.”

  Jeff turned in his chair to look into her face. “Eat all you can while you’re here,” he said bluntly. “You’re too thin.”

  “I beg your pardon?” She was not used to hearing comments on her appearance. And such an unflattering remark was not at all what she hoped to hear from Jeff Dane.

  “Scrawny, spare, skinny. Take your choice.” He leaned closer to her. His thigh pressed against hers. Her jerked back. “I know you haven’t had enough to eat for a long time. So fill up, every day, three times a day or more.”

  “Mr. Dane, what I eat and when are none of your . . . I am your guest and I thank you for your kindness to me, but if you’d be so good as to . . .”

  “I don’t want you to thank me for my kindness. Here,” he spooned up an extra helping of mashed potatoes and plopped them on her plate. “Put some butter on that and get it down.”

  “Mr. Dane!” Edith tossed her napkin on the table and stood up, all in one seamless motion. “Please excuse me!”

  “Nice going, son,” Sam said as Edith stalked out of the room.

  “Nice going,” Maribel echoed.

  “Skinny!” Edith fumed as she closed her bedroom door. Even as angry as she was, long training kept her from slamming it.

  “Scrawny!” She sat on the bed but couldn’t stay still.

  “Thin!” Catching sight of herself in the mirror, Edith frowned. This far away, she could see all of her person.

  The full-skirted dress, the prettiest thing she’d ever worn, had been a pleasure to put on. The muslin, embroidered all over with tiny blue flowers, had a soft sheen and skimmed over her body without any sensation of weight. Edith had practically skipped down the stairs this morning, just to feel the fabric swaying around her.

  Now, however, she saw that the looseness of the fit emphasized her slender waist, while the rest of it hung about her like a sack. Her bony wrists emerged nakedly from the ruffled sleeves. Beneath the full skirt, her ankles looked too frail to support her. Not to mention that the new, less harsh hairstyle she’d tried today only made her cheekbones stand out, turning her eyes into saucers.

  Edith acknowledged in shame that she had hoped to please Jeff by these changes. She writhed to remember how she had primped in this mirror, trying her hair this way and that, and pressing her lips together hard to make them pinker. It seemed only right that her pathetic efforts to ensnare Jeff had brought his censure down upon her.

  Approaching the mirror, Edith shook her head at her folly. It seemed so typical that she could not tempt him when she wanted to. For she confessed to her reflection that she had indeed been trying to rouse the brute beast that supposedly slept in every man’s soul. All she’d managed to awaken was his pity, something she could very well get along without.

  A rapping at her door made her call, “Come in.” Realizing her eyes were wet, she knuckled away the tears just before the door opened.

  Louise stood there, agitation plain in her twisting hands and stuttering voice. “Please, C-Cousin Edith. It’s Maribel.”

  “What’s the matter?” She began to grow anxious, pushing aside her misery.

  “She’s in the root cellar and I can’t budge the door.”

  “The root cellar? What on earth is she doing there?�
�� Edith hurried down the stairs.

  “She wanted an apple. Grandpa told her she couldn’t but she wanted one awful bad. . . .”

  “Where is your grandfather? And your father?”

  “Please, hurry! It’s awful dark in there.”

  They rushed outside, Edith’s skirt trailing across the wet grass. She gave no thought, however, to her beautiful kid shoes. The important thing was to reach Maribel.

  Two doors of wooden planks lay across the opening. Earth had been piled up and then faced with boards to make an entry. A latch had fallen across the two handles. Leaning forward, Edith slid the latch away.

  The door wasn’t that heavy, but Edith supposed it must have seemed so to Louise. It was awkward, though, swinging crookedly to the side. Putting her foot on the first step that lead down into the darkness, Edith called, “Maribel?”

  “She must be in the back, where the apples are,” Louise suggested. “At least she won’t be so frightened. Maybe if you go down there . . .”

  Edith nodded. Slowly, watching her footing, she descended. “Maribel, dear. Come out now. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  She wished she’d brought a lamp. There was only dirt underfoot but the floor was uneven. Her voice fell strangely flat as she moved farther away from the shaft behind her. Looking up, she called, “I don’t see . . .”

  Abruptly, the light went out as the cellar door slammed down. “Louise!” Edith called.

  “Yes, Cousin Edith?”

  “Are you all right, dear?”

  “Oh, yes, Cousin Edith. But I still can’t move this door.”

  “Where’s your father?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’s your grandfather?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Edith uttered a sigh of vexation. How like men, she thought. But then she smiled, for it struck her suddenly that she sounded like a woman with a thousand years’ experience of their sex, rather than a girl with but a week’s knowledge.

  “Well, go and find them, like a good girl,” Edith said.

  “You’ll wait right there?”