Ordinary Love and Good Will

by Jane Smiley

  “He wasn’t any more shy, even at first, than he is with anyone else.”

  “He talked to her.”

  “He even tried to impress her. When we were walking down toward the pond, he was talking about fishing.”

  “He didn’t get the look, either. That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “He played rough with her, but she was up for it. And he didn’t go overboard. When she fell, it sobered him right up, right there.”

  “That doesn’t always happen.”

  “Their behavior was perfectly reciprocal. He didn’t do anything inappropriate.”

  “And at the end he was quite polite to Lydia. I didn’t detect any anxiety or fear of her, or revulsion. When she held out her hand, he simply took it.”

  “Well, I never thought he was a dyed-in-the-wool racist. I always thought he was just spouting something he’d heard.” I pause, and Liz says, “I was worried for a while that he somehow got it from us.”

  “From your mother?”

  Liz rolls her eyes. “He hasn’t seen her since he was two. I’m sure when she was here the last time, she was far too busy deploring our living conditions to bother with his social education. I thought it might be genes or something.” She looks over at the sound of my skeptical sniff and smiles. “Come on. We don’t know every little thing we are communicating. We might think we weren’t racist, but still let something drop.”

  “On what occasion? There were never black people in Moreton until now. We don’t have television. We don’t even have a radio or a record player.”

  “You know something? Annabel could be the first black person Tommy’s ever seen, except in a magazine.”

  “I can’t believe that.” But we sit back and stare at one another, because suddenly our little boy’s life, which we always think of as nestled into ours, even partaking, somehow, of what we did and saw before him, appears to us as it must to him, vast, whole. I say, “It is weird to think that this is all he’s ever known.”

  Liz’s glance is sly. “Wasn’t that the point?”

  I get up and adjust one of the window panels and take a turn around the room. It was, but when I think of it like this, it seems a little frightening. Liz calmly picks up her knitting, and though I am tempted to divulge my little flutter of panic, this sudden inner vacuum, still narrow as a hair, but real, I don’t. I say, “Actually, I didn’t find Annabel an especially attractive child.”

  “With those eyes? You must be blind!” Liz laughs.

  “She has a very sour attitude.” I know I sound harsh. “She thinks it’s her right to be pleased with everything.”

  Liz eyes me.

  “She just dropped her coat in the middle of the ice and expected Lydia to retrieve it.”

  Liz smiles.

  “What?”

  “Every time she said a word, you scowled. It’s not our business.”

  “Most of her words were dissatisfied or unpleasant.”

  “She fell down and bit her tongue! She’s seven years old, anyway.”

  “I’m glad she’s not our kid.”

  “She’s very pretty and graceful. And I bet she’s smart, too, and I don’t believe for a moment what the teacher said last fall about maybe she didn’t understand the word ‘nigger.’ She doesn’t have the easiest life.”

  “I would have thought the same thing if she were blonde and blue-eyed.”

  “I’m not accusing you of racism. Are we having a fight?”

  “I think I’m having a fight with myself. But Tom was fine. He seemed perfectly accepting. I’d be surprised if the trouble weren’t over now. They might even get to be friends.”

  I am agitated. I go out onto the porch to get some sticks of wood and look outward, and the sprays of stars washing through each other in the clear black sky above our valley fail to soothe me. That other constellation, the window lights of Moreton fanning across the flank of Snowy Top, seems to retreat rather than to open toward us; I am momentarily saddened, as if something has happened, but, of course, nothing has, and when I come in, Liz is sitting at her loom, a cup of tea steaming lazily at her side. Another cup is sitting by my chair, and the click of her shuttle and the rich sassafras fragrance seem like two halves of the same whole comfort, something I do not at the moment feel, though I can see it in the distance, moving toward me.

  After two weeks in the barn, both the pony and the foal are frisky and rambunctious. The mare throws her head up as I lead her out the door, and flares her nostrils at the fresh scents. The foal trots forward a few steps, then halts, trembling, her furry ears flicking back and forth. She paws the crusty snow and snorts a ruffling, miniature snort. The mare neighs to her, and that seems to set her off. She races toward the pasture fence, bucking and kicking. Tom, sitting on the fence, laughs. “She feels good, doesn’t she, Daddy? What a pretty girl! Come get the carrot. Here it is. Come get it.” He waits. She stops a few feet from him, throws her head, and skitters away. The mare snorts and farts and shivers all the skin along her back, ambles into the snowy pasture. The foal sails in after, her brief tail pointing stiffly upward, like the tail of a deer. They might find something under the snow—it has melted down a few inches in the last two days, as we have had temperatures well above freezing, a Valentine’s Day thaw.

  The sky is clear. The air is mild and thick with sun-warmed rising moisture. The mountainsides close at hand are still white entangled with brown and tan, but the dark, brushy humps beyond are a deep, winy purple, reflecting the depths above them. I can see curve folding upon curve, no precipitous, spectacular summits, as out west, no glittering peaks blazing white above the tree line, but something more soothing, and more mysterious to me, the unending mansion of the forest, full of clearings, spaces, openings, cells, and each of these private rooms inhabited by some animal or insect or protozoan. We do not live in the easiest country—the ground is rocky and steep—but there is not a cubic inch that isn’t rife with activity and the jostle of living competition. I have always found grandeur in this variety, and a ready vision of the Earth itself—if here, then everywhere, a rock molded into roundness by the eternal work of numberless paws, wings, feet, mandibles, roots, appetites, intentions.

  It is Sunday, and Liz has not gone to church.

  Tom’s boots, which Liz got at the Goodwill before Christmas, are too big, so, when he goes out into the middle of the pasture, he lifts his feet and puts them down as if he were carrying something on his metatarsals. The coat we got was a lucky find: real goose and duck down, with a fur-trimmed hood. Liz sewed in a lining that she knitted to fit, wool, like a sweater, but covered with cotton so it wouldn’t chafe. When he was a baby, she made him a suit out of sheepskin and wool. She cut a flat, baby shape out of a sheepskin, then sewed to it a crocheted top, wool on the outside, cotton on the inside. She could slip him into this in only a diaper and be confident that he was warm and comfortable. I built her a rocking bench with a turned spool barrier across part of the front, so that she could lay him next to her in his sheepskin pouch, then rock, coo, and have her hands free. I wonder what it would be like to raise a child with money. All his life we have been devising things for his benefit; he has been our experimental subject, and I admit he has been a good one, receptive, appreciative, flexible about ideas that looked good on paper but didn’t work, like the knitted wool diaper covers that were supposed to wick moisture away from the baby so that it could evaporate. He is a good boy, and I love him, but lately I have been remembering Lydia Harris’s face as she watched Annabel and then as she turned her over after her accident. There was an interest there that I wonder if I have ever felt, a spectator’s interest that is not predicated on approval or disapproval. She liked to watch Annabel act. I like to see Tom act properly. At the time a cause and effect seemed to be at work—had she expected more of Annabel, Annabel would have behaved better. But now, even though I know that, I am envious of her pleasure, the way you get envious when some friend you think is years past romance falls in love again, ge
ts to have a delicious rare liquor that you can’t afford.

  Right now Tom does act properly. He stands in the center of the pasture, relaxed and patient, waiting for the foal to come to him, to take the carrot and accept the halter. She paws the snow, snorts into it, rears up and bucks. He smiles, but he doesn’t laugh. He knows he is the most intriguing object in the pasture, and that she is pointedly ignoring him. He holds out the carrot, and she does a funny thing—curls her upper lip back and tosses her muzzle rhythmically up and down six or seven times, then faces him, suddenly quiet. He holds out the carrot, but makes no other move. In the damp air, I can hear his low, encouraging chatter. Step by step she comes up to him. As she takes the carrot between her lips, he slips the halter up his arm and over her head. As soon as she finishes the carrot, he turns and leads her away. She follows, self-contained but docile. Liz says that cats and horses have an innate esthetic sense. Sometimes I agree. Tom and Sparkle march around the periphery of the pasture, developing good habits. He is all taken up by her.

  Liz is standing between the barn and the root cellar, watching, not really presenting herself. Perhaps what she sees is an emblem of defeat to her, but I am relieved she is here, whatever her reason for staying home. There was never a time when I saw her leave that my eyes didn’t follow her until she was out of sight, and that I didn’t feel a gravelly stretching ache at the sight of her receding back. I like them contained here, where nothing is sudden or unknown. I wave cheerfully to my wife, and she waves cheerfully back. The foal flicks her ears but makes no unexpected moves. The mare, who has worked her way around the field, nuzzles in my jacket for her apple. I feed her with one hand and press the other up under her mane. Her winter coat is thick and coarse, warm and inviting. Rubbing the hard muscle in her crest is like giving my hand a delightful massage. She arches her neck and presses against my palm. Whether she has esthetic tastes or not, she certainly has sensual appetites. After twenty circuits of the pasture, Tom is ready to tie Sparkle to the fence and groom her. The mare follows them and nuzzles the foal two or three times, then resumes foraging in the thinning snow cover for the grass underneath.

  The orchard has forty trees that I have planted—fifteen apples, five pears, five apricots, five peaches, five sour cherries, and five plums. The apricots, peaches, and plums I got when I did some work at a nursery in State College, and the sour cherries are an experimental variety that I grew for the university. The apples are all old varieties, and I got them all for free. It’s an old hunter’s tradition: to repay a farmer for being allowed to hunt on his land, you prune his overgrown orchard every so often. I also made a habit of picking up windfall apples, or digging up seedlings and bringing them back with me. Most of the orchards in these parts are a hundred years old, so the apple trees grow true to type, but the types are unusual, and I can only guess at what I have from asking older folks who visit and reading books in the library. They grow; we eat them and dry them and make them into sauce. A few trees that were bearing before the farmhouse burned down in the last century still produce every so often. Out of those trees I have pruned so much dead wood that they look Japanese, but I am determined to save them. I love to prune. It is a perfect day to prune: a day when spring is a certainty rather than a hope, no matter how many more snowstorms we have to look forward to.

  While I am getting out my shears and saw, Tommy leads the foal out of the pasture and back to the barn. She goes quietly, and the mare follows. I look for the oil to lubricate the joint of the pruning shears, and just after I find it, Tom comes out of the barn, swinging the halter on his arm. I say, “Did you make sure the latch was tight?” and he says, “Yes, Daddy,” and I promise myself to check. These moments are clear in my mind. I know these things are said. Even though we have had this exchange a hundred times, this time my instinct is to pay attention to it, and I do.

  Plums and peaches and apricots, all you really need to do is take off the dead wood, and make sure that sunlight can get to the interior of the tree. Apples are more interesting, and like to be given a shape. A well-pruned apple orchard looks beautiful all year round, because, even when the leaves have dropped, the limbs of the trees and the trees of the orchard make a figure, crooked but graceful, ordered but various. Liz calls the orchard my “stabile.”

  The pruning takes almost until dark, and the goats are bleating to be fed and milked. By the time I come in, Tom and Liz have already finished their potato soup and Tom, worn out from climbing into the higher branches and setting the saw for me, has gone straight to bed. I am tired, too, and hungry for my own potato soup.

  Liz sits with me. The soup is pungent and rich with mushrooms we picked and dried last spring, and I push my hunk of dark bread into it, then eat the bread with my spoon. The crust is chewy and delicious. Liz says, “We could breed the pony again. Howard won’t mind.”

  “It’s such a big project.”

  “But we’ve done it once now. We know how to go about it. Tom is old enough to walk the pony over there, too. It’s only a couple of miles.”

  “Ponies don’t produce anything on a farm, they just eat.”

  “They produce great manure.”

  “Well, sheep manure is more—”

  “They produce a sense of responsibility and ownership in the son.”

  I push my bowl across the table; Liz smiles and gets up to refill it. To her back, I say, “He is good with them. It won’t be long before he gets beyond me, though. One pony, he can sort of play it by ear, especially this pony, because she’s so even-tempered, but more than that, I don’t know if we can handle it—”

  “Howard can give us advice.” She sets the bowl in front of me.

  “Howard is full of advice, but I don’t think he knows much, between you and me.”

  “I still think it’s a good idea.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Can I say one more thing?”

  “What?”

  “He’s had a hard year. He would love this.”

  “He made it hard for himself. I don’t think we should reward him for that.”

  Her lips close tightly, disappear. She does not relinquish my gaze, though. It is probably better not to address these differences about the sources of his behavior. It is probably better to drop the subject, and I do. Fourteen years together have taught me the profound but laborious discipline of knowing when to press the point and when to stop. I cut another hunk of bread and lay it in the bowl. The thick soup seeps upward, and the bread inflates. Liz is a wonderful cook.

  She leaves me at the table and goes over to her spinning wheel, which I built from a pattern in a magazine from the library. In the magazine it was constructed of pecan, but it looks better in black walnut, dark and silky. She sits on the stool and begins carding some of last fall’s lamb’s wool into airy little sausages, called “rolags,” I believe. There is tension, but it is not about the pony. We always have projects that we raise and discuss and disagree on. What is unspoken of is the church issue, and the time to discuss it is approaching. All day, though she has been calm and smiling and even jovial from time to time, I have imagined her tight and angry. I know this is guilt talking. I have imagined myself, too, those fifty-five or sixty Sundays, never failing to undermine her—asking her where she is going when I know, suggesting something complicated and delicious for breakfast in front of Tom so that she will have to disappoint him (I did that three times), making something complicated and delicious for breakfast that she would have to miss (I only did that once), receiving her good-bye kiss stiffly, as if insulted, telling her over and over that she didn’t have to apologize or ask permission to go, never giving her an opening so that she might ask me to attend some function with her, never making it easy for Tom to go along. But she has persevered in attendance, participation, prayer. She has carried home funny bits and entertained me with them, she has spoken naturally and fondly of people I haven’t met. She has, in fact, been rather a holy person, virtuous and patient.

 
This morning she just stayed home. I asked her if she was feeling ill. She wasn’t. We had oatmeal and dried peaches for breakfast. The dishes were cleaned up in plenty of time. But then, instead of putting on her coat, she sat down at her knitting, a sweater for herself. I went outside. I kept my eye on the door, but it never opened until she called us in for lunch. Now, eight or ten rolags ranged beside her, she starts to spin. She pushes the treadle with her foot, and the large wheel begins to turn the bobbin with a clicking whir. Her fingers work precisely, and the spindle draws the thread from them, twisting the fibers of wool together into a kind of flowing, almost liquid line. She says, “Are you going to do something or just watch me?”

  “We should have walked in to the library yesterday. It wasn’t that cold.”

  “You haven’t read that last book. I thought you wanted to read that.”

  “I could do some washing.”

  “Do you really want to start that? It’s nearly nine-thirty.”

  I feel balked, restless. Maybe she isn’t going to bring it up after all. The clicking whir continues through our conversation. The house seems cramped. I go to the window and look toward Moreton, trying to make out Lydia Harris’s mullioned windows. I imagine each pane alight, the chandelier tinily reproduced twenty or forty times, Lydia in some vivid blue, reading in a bright chair, music playing.

  “Are you upset, Robert?”

  “Do I seem upset?”

  “You’ve seemed sort of edgy all day.”

  “Is that angry edgy or anxious edgy?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “I was hoping you would make the diagnosis. I’m not sure. Why didn’t you go to church?”

  She laughs a full, merry laugh. “It isn’t church.”

  “Your Fellowship Meeting.”