Mary Dell, who by this time had finished diapering and dressing Howard, said in a deliberately patient voice, “No, Granny. I am reading all that stuff to figure out how to raise Howard. Every spare second I have, I spend reading up on babies, and Down syndrome, and how to help Howard learn. I bet I’ve read more books in the last three weeks than I did in all my years in school.
“Of course,” she said as she laid the baby in his crib and covered him with a new quilt stitched together from white, black, and red fabrics, “if I had read more books when I was in school, I’d probably be able to get through this stuff faster. Seems I’ve got to stop and look up every third word. Spent a whole day last week reading up on how babies see. They like black, red, and white best. That’s when I decided to redo the nursery.”
Mary Dell swept out her arm to draw attention to the room, which Silky realized had been entirely redecorated. In addition to the mural over the crib and the new quilt and new black-and-white-striped bumper pads, the blue walls had been repainted white and a border of red and black ABC blocks circled the room, pasted about three and a half feet up from the floor, the perfect height for the baby to look at as he lay in his crib or on the changing table. The pastel painting of the cow jumping over the moon had been replaced by two smaller pictures in red frames, black-and-white prints of faces, one smiling, one frowning.
This new nursery was stark and modern-looking, like something you saw in one of those magazines about architecture and people who lived in tiny apartments in big cities. It wasn’t unattractive, but it wasn’t to Silky’s taste, especially not in a nursery. It must have taken Mary Dell hours to put away all the old things, repaint the walls, and put up the new, all while trying to plow through that stack of books and take care of her baby and husband. Though, come to think of it, it looked like Mary Dell was only reading books and taking care of the baby, leaving Donny to fend for himself. Maybe that explained why she hadn’t seen him in church with the rest of the family for the last three weeks and why she’d twice seen Donny’s truck parked outside the Ice House in the middle of the day.
It was natural, she supposed, for a new momma to go a little goofy over her baby at first, sometimes even to the point of neglecting her husband, but they usually calmed down and got back to normal before long. And while Silky thought Mary Dell was right in wanting to learn all she could about Down syndrome and how to help Howard reach his full potential, she thought the way in which she was going about it was . . . well, disproportionate! And if there’s one thing Silky believed in, it was proportion.
Making a good life was like making a good cake—you needed a little bit of this, a little bit of that, everything according to its proper measure and not too much of any one ingredient, no matter how delicious it might be. Otherwise, you risked letting one flavor overpower all the others. And if you went way, way overboard? The whole thing might even collapse in the oven or crumble to pieces when you were trying to serve it.
After Howard was tucked in, Silky and Mary Dell tiptoed out of the nursery and into the dining area. Silky stood there looking on as her granddaughter sat down at the table and began poring over books without even offering her a cup of coffee. That’s when she decided that Mary Dell’s cake was dangerously close to falling. Something needed to be done.
She went into the kitchen and started washing dishes.
“Where do you keep your scouring pad?” Mary Dell didn’t respond, but Silky found one under the sink. “Never mind. I found it.
“Donny will be home before too long, won’t he? What were you thinking of making for supper? Maybe I can get it started for you.”
Silky stood there for a minute, waiting. When she got no answer, she became annoyed, put two fingers into her mouth, and whistled.
Mary Dell jumped and hissed, “Hush, Granny! You’ll wake the baby!”
The old woman put her hands on her hips. “Mary Dell, I asked you a question. What time will your husband come home, and what were you planning to make for his supper?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Mary Dell shrugged. “Late, I guess. There’s fish sticks and tater tots in the freezer. He’s been heating those up most nights. Either that or picking up some barbecue.”
Silky believed in the old adage that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. The truth of this had been proven to her satisfaction when her late husband, Hooty, caught a whiff of the freshly fried chicken she had stowed in her basket at the church picnic and started following her across the grass, leaving his fiancée sitting alone on a blanket. Naturally, she was horrified by Mary Dell’s cavalier attitude regarding her husband’s dinner.
“Mary Dell, you can’t just let your husband live on fish sticks! I know you’re busy taking care of Howard, but your husband needs to be babied a little bit too.”
Mary Dell rolled her eyes. “Oh, Granny. Donny understands that Howard is the most important thing right now. Don’t worry so much.”
Mary Dell lowered her head over the book, squinted, chewed the end of a pencil, then sighed and started flipping the pages of a nearby dictionary, completely ignoring her grandmother.
Silky shook her head and opened the refrigerator. The pickings were slim, but in the vegetable drawer she found a bag of potatoes sprouting a few eyes—but not too soft—and a lemon. In the freezer, behind the fish sticks and tater tots, she discovered a chicken and a bag of peas.
While the chicken was thawing in the microwave (an invention that worked so slick she thought about getting one for herself), Silky finished washing the dishes and wiped down the countertops. Mary Dell was almost out of Crisco, so Silky roasted the chicken instead of frying it, cutting the lemon in half and stuffing it inside the bird, then making a paste of oil, salt, pepper, dried rosemary and thyme and rubbing it over the skin before putting it in the oven. She put the potatoes on to boil, then tidied up the living room, ran the vacuum, and gave the bathroom a quick going-over. When that was done, she mashed the potatoes with butter, salt, and a good grind of pepper, cooked the peas, pouring in a little bacon fat to give them flavor, and pulled the chicken out of the oven.
Mary Dell didn’t move during the entire time Silky was working, only stirring when a plaintive wail from the nursery alerted her that Howard had finished his nap. She lifted her head at his first cry and looked around, seemingly surprised at her home’s transformation.
“Granny, you didn’t have to do all this.”
“No? Well, somebody had to,” Silky said as she opened her purse and fished out her car keys. “When Donny gets home, tell him I said hello. But don’t tell him I made supper, let him think you did.”
Mary Dell gave Silky a peck on the cheek. “Silly old woman. Would you quit worrying? I told you . . .”
“I know what you told me. Now let me tell you something,” Silky said with a shake of her finger. “Nobody ever lost money overestimating the fragility of a man’s ego. I’ve got an idea. Why don’t I come over on Saturday night and watch the baby while you and Donny go out dancing?”
“Gosh. That’s real nice of you, Granny. But . . . Howard’s just so little yet. Thanks for cleaning up and making dinner, though. I appreciate it.”
The cries coming from the nursery grew louder and more insistent. Mary Dell glanced from her grandmother’s face to the hallway and back.
“Oh, go on,” Silky said, giving her granddaughter an affectionate nudge toward the nursery. “But mind what I said. Let Donny think you cooked for him. And fix up your hair before he gets home. Put on some lipstick while you’re at it.”
Silky got into her car, a blue 1964 Buick LeSabre with 18,000 miles on the odometer, and drove to town to pick up groceries and a bottle of blue rinse for her hair. On the way, she passed the Ice House. Donny’s truck was parked outside, again.
She thought about parking herself, going inside and giving him a talking-to, but decided against it. This being Too Much, she knew that the story of Donny Bebee’s granny-in-law tracking him down at the bar would spread quic
ker than wildfire in tumbleweed, and she figured Donny didn’t need that kind of humiliation right now.
Even so, as Silky drove down the road toward town, pressing down the gas pedal to increase the LeSabre’s speed to a zippy thirty-one miles per hour, she couldn’t help but glance into the rearview mirror, keeping an eye on Donny’s pickup for as long as she could, hoping to see him come out of the Ice House and head for home.
“This ain’t good,” she mumbled to herself. “No good at all.”
CHAPTER 20
When he arrived home, long after Mary Dell had gone to bed, Donny ate the food Silky had prepared for him. He took a spoon out of the drawer and used it to eat potatoes and peas directly from the pot. Then he ripped a leg from the cold chicken carcass and ate it while standing over the sink, staring vacantly out the window into the black night. The next day, he was up early and left the house around four thirty, just as Mary Dell was rising to nurse the baby.
He had not been going to the Ice House every day and drinking himself into a stupor, as Silky feared.
The first time Silky spotted his truck at the Ice House, little more than a week before, was the first time he’d ever gone there without Mary Dell. Since then, he showed up daily, but not until he had finished his work. He arrived every afternoon around three, asked for a pickled egg or some pork rinds and a beer, and nursed it until the bartender started to give him the fish eye, then ordered one more and nursed that until closing time.
He didn’t go to the Ice House to get drunk but because he couldn’t think of anyplace else to go. And because he was tired. Bone tired. Had been ever since the night of Howard’s birth. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t sleep during the night and couldn’t stop himself from working during the day.
He was at the barn or in the pasture by five and drove himself hard all day long, craving the distraction of physical labor, driven to tackle every one of the hard, dirty jobs that he normally had a tendency to put off, leaving the hired men to deal with the cattle and sheep.
He mucked out the horse stalls, tarred the roof of the chicken coop. He replaced the rotten gate posts in the paddock and the loose shingles on the barn. He mended all the fences, dug post holes by hand, vaccinated the calves, and castrated the young bulls. He slaughtered one animal and had the butcher cut up the meat, wrap it, and deliver it back to the ranch to fill the chest freezer. And, even though it was early in the year, he ordered an additional supply of feed and hay and made sure the loft was as full as it possibly could be.
By the time he’d consumed Grandma Silky’s roast chicken, he’d finished every chore on his list but one—inspecting the horse stalls for loose or rotting boards. Once that was done, until lambing time, the season of anxious days and long nights when the ewes, simultaneously bred months before, gave birth, the ranch could practically run itself, as much as ranches ever did.
But to say that Donny planned to leave wouldn’t be true, not at first.
Initially, he had been driven to work because that was Donny’s natural reaction to tragedy, the only way he knew to keep himself from thinking too hard or feeling too much. He’d always been that way. That was how the old barn, so old it was about ready to fall down, had been torn down and a new one built in its place. Because when Donny got the telegram saying Graydon had been killed in action, he had to do something to keep himself from falling apart, and the something he’d done was build the barn.
When Howard was born and the doctor told them the child had Down syndrome, Donny reacted the same way. He worked. He worked every day, from dawn to dusk, as hard as he could.
As the days and weeks passed and he saw less and less of his wife and son, he became more and more cognizant that Mary Dell didn’t need his help, that he was not only in the way but that his presence distracted and hampered her from caring for Howard. He started thinking about and making a list of what Mary Dell and Howard would need, at least in the short term, if something were to happen to him—if he were to die or disappear for some reason.
Not that he expected this to happen, not at any level he could consciously admit to, but just in case.
Arriving at the barn the next morning, he went through his routine. He released the chickens from the coop, fed and watered them, went to the pigpen and fed the sows, then went inside the barn, grabbed a feed bucket, scooped a measure of oats into it, and carried it back to the stalls for Georgeann.
But when he pulled the chain and switched on the bare overhead bulb, he didn’t hear the horse’s welcoming nicker or see her head sticking out over the top of the stall. Instead, he heard a frantic kicking of hoof on wood, an agonized whinny, the sound of suffering.
Georgeann was down, cast in the stall. Sometime during the night, she had rolled over, gotten one of her forelegs stuck in a loose board and, unable to free herself, had likely panicked and begun to thrash and kick against the boards, finally kicking herself loose, but at a great consequence.
Damn it! Damn it to hell!
It was the last chore on his list, checking those boards. When he’d taken a quick glance a few weeks before, that stall looked perfectly sound, and so he’d left it for last, thinking everything was fine, adding it to the list only from an abundance of caution.
Damn.
Georgeann sputtered and looked up at him with agonized eyes, silently begging him to do something. He opened the stall door and squatted down next to her.
The foreleg was broken; he knew that just by looking. It was dangling at a cruel angle, like a jagged comma.
He was powerless. There was nothing he could do to help or heal her. Breaks like that couldn’t be mended. And there’s no such thing as a three-legged horse.
Donny stroked Georgeann’s neck, sweaty from fear and the effort of freeing herself. “Hey there. I know. I know it hurts. Hush now, girl. Hush. Settle down. Everything’s going to be all right,” he murmured, even though he knew it wasn’t.
When her body became more relaxed and her eyes less panicked, Donny got up, went to his truck, pulled the rifle from the rack, and went back to the stall, killing her clean and quick with one bullet.
The sound of the gunshot, ringing sharp in the half darkness that precedes dawn, startled the sows, set the chickens to clucking, and made up Donny’s mind for him, forcing him to admit what he’d feared all along—that he was powerless. That no matter how hard you work, how hard you try, there are some things that can’t be helped or fixed.
He supposed there were men who could live with that, who could stand aside, spread their hands and let it go, but he knew he wasn’t one of them.
Donny borrowed a backhoe and buried his horse, did his work, cared for his stock, drove over to the big house, and asked his father-in-law if he could take care of the animals in the morning because he had to do some errands in Waco. Then he drove back to the barn and repaired the loose boards in the vacant stall. When that was done, he went to the Ice House, ordered a bourbon, just one, and tossed it back.
The baby was asleep when he got home, but Mary Dell was still up, sitting at the dining room table, reading an article about the three different kinds of Down syndrome: nondisjunction, translocation, and mosaicism.
Donny showered and changed, put some clean clothes into the paper grocery sack he’d used to bring Mary Dell’s things to the hospital, then opened the bedroom window and left the sack outside.
He went into the nursery to see his sleeping child, leaning over the crib to kiss Howard’s soft cheek with his chapped lips, laid his heavy hand over the boy’s little body and left it there a moment, feeling his chest rise and fall.
“Be a good boy,” he whispered.
Mary Dell was still reading, but she looked up when he came into the dining area. “Everything all right?”
“Yes,” he said, leaning down to kiss the top of her head, stroking her blond hair with his hand. “Everything’s all right.”
Donny heated what was left of the chicken, potatoes, and peas in the microwave and brought two
plates to the table. They ate dinner together, talking a little but not much, and mostly about Howard. Donny didn’t say anything about what happened to Georgeann, but when he got up to clear the dishes, he did tell Mary Dell that he loved her.
Mary Dell looked up at him. “I love you too, darlin’.”
“Listen,” Donny said as he scraped chicken bones into the trash, “I’ve got to run into town. I had to borrow Clyde Pickens’s backhoe today, and I promised to get it back to him before dark.”
“Why didn’t you just return it before you came home?”
Donny shrugged. “Wanted to see you first, I guess.”
Mary Dell smiled. “You’re sweet. Hon, as long as you’re out, run by the Tidee-Mart and pick up some Crisco, milk, and a loaf of bread, would you? You want me to write it down?”
“No,” Donny said, and kissed her one more time. “No need for that.”
CHAPTER 21
Graydon Bebee popped a last bite of cornbread into his mouth and washed it down with a gulp of coffee before getting up from the table.
L. J. “Little Jim” Spreewell, Graydon’s boss, who looked to be in no hurry to get back to work, dumped another spoonful of sugar into his cup and flipped through a pile of mail.
“You figure out what’s wrong with the tractor yet?” he asked without looking up.
The Spreewells owned a farm outside of Liberal, Kansas, where they grew wheat and corn and raised fifty head of sheep. In exchange for room, board, and one hundred dollars a week, Graydon worked the fields, tended the sheep, and did anything else L. J. said needed doing. Graydon ate his meals with the Spreewells but otherwise kept to himself. He spent nights in his room, a rustically remodeled shed, with no phone, no TV, and no companion except for his old friend, Jack Daniel’s. L. J. knew about that, but as long as Graydon didn’t let his drinking interfere with his work, he didn’t ask questions. They were men of few words, and so the arrangement worked well for both parties.
Between Heaven and Texas Page 11