Moving On (104 page)

But when finally the depression lifted, it occurred to her that it was silly to go around moping because she wasn’t Anna Karenina. It was sillier than any of the other things she had done. She took Davey with her to Mr. Plum’s and let him try a piece of chewing gum. A blue piece. He swallowed it, but not before a dribble of blue coloring had run out his mouth, down his chin, and onto his white sweater. “I keep the gum there to make business for myself,” Mr. Plum said. She took Davey into the park and sat on the jungle gym while he moved around and around it below, squinting up at her. Emma was driving by on her way home from taking Flap to Rice, and she stopped to yak awhile. She was looking peaked and feeling peaked and their moods clashed a little, for Patsy was just back to delighting in everything after two days of moping because her life lacked scale. She overresponded when Emma told her she had turned up pregnant.

“I’m envious,” she said, and she was.

But Emma was in no mood to be envied. “Don’t envy me if you want to remain my friend,” she said glumly. “I wish I weren’t so forgetful. I’ve got all the kids I need.”

“Come on,” Patsy said. “You couldn’t not like a baby.”

Emma sat down on a bench and sighed. “I can’t not like a baby but I can damn well not like the idea of one. We’ll only have been in Iowa City three months when it comes.”

Patsy was tired of the song and dance of cheering Emma up with the possible virtues of Iowa City, so she didn’t try. She told her she had been depressed by reading
Anna
. Emma thought she probably would be too, and soon hurried on. Patsy lingered with Davey in the park, thinking of Emma having another baby. The thought led back to herself. When would she have another? When would Davey get brothers and sisters? And who would their father be? It was a shivery thing to think about, and she felt too good to dwell on it, so she put Davey in his carriage and wheeled him briskly home. It was a warm February morning, and she found it difficult not to believe that something good would happen. What, when, with whom, she didn’t know, but she could not feel downhearted on such a bright day. She had a fine son and a very pleasant house in which to wait.

14

W
ITHIN A WEEK
something did happen, but instead of a new man coming into her life, an old man went out of it. She was feeding Davey spinach and making a mess of it, one day at lunch, when Roger Wagonner’s sister called to tell her Roger was dead. His sister was older than he had been and had a dry cracked voice and the accents of West Texas.

“How did you know to call me” Patsy asked, stunned. She had scarcely taken in the details, which were that Roger had had a stroke and had been dead two days when the mailman found him.

“Well, Roger wrote us about you, honey, when he decided to leave his property to you.”

“I’m sorry,” Patsy said. “I just can’t think. What can I do?”

“Not much more to be done,” the old lady said. “You know how thoughtful Roger was. He paid the funeral home two years ago, they told us. All we have to pay is the increase in price.”

“Oh, dear. When will the funeral be?”

Tomorrow, she was told, and the old lady rambled on in her twangy small-town schoolteacher’s tone about how good Roger had been, how methodical, how he had arranged with a neighbor to take care of his animals in such an event. Patsy numbly agreed, though she had never thought of him as methodical and couldn’t, any more than she could immediately think of him as dead. Even in her numbness, though, she felt a certain embarrassment, and a fear that his sister would resent her because of the land. But before she could say anything the old lady relieved her mind.

“Honey, don’t you be worried about us wanting that land,” she said kindly. “We ain’t got long to live ourselves and of course I guess he told you about us losing our boy, so don’t you worry about it. If Billy had lived we would have wanted him to have it, but me and my husband can’t hardly take care of what we’ve got in Wilbarger County, much less Roger’s old place. We told him ourselves he ought to leave it to somebody young—somebody who could enjoy it.”

“Oh, thank you,” Patsy said, though she did not believe that she would ever enjoy it. The kindliness of the voice on the wire was so akin in tone to that of the man who was dead that it was causing her to cry. Her inclination was not to go to the funeral, or near the ranch at all for many months until her memories had worn smooth again, but then she recalled that Roger had driven all the way to Houston because she had had a child. The least she could do was go to his funeral, since he had died. She said she would be there and hung up.

She lay down on her couch to weep, but then got up and immediately began packing, still crying. She didn’t want to give herself any time to think. In an hour and a half she, Juanita, and Davey were in the Ford and on the way to Dallas. Davey was cheerful and excited, bouncing on his car seat, patting Patsy’s shoulder, and occasionally grabbing her hair. Juanita was worried about proprieties. She would be staying in Dallas to help Jeanette with Davey, and she had had to pack in such a hurry that she was sure she had come off without something that might be socially essential. Her weeks in Dallas while Jim had been recuperating had not intimidated her, exactly, but they had informed her. She knew Jeanette expected of her what one should expect of a maid, while Patsy’s expectations were lighter and, she could not help feeling, somewhat erratic and eccentric. She loved Patsy dearly but she had always been a little worried about her behavior. Every few miles she bethought herself of something she might have left, and turned and rummaged in her handbag to see if it was there.

It was a bright cold March day, with a few small high clouds and a keen wind that caused the Ford some strain; it had not been on the open road in months and ran peculiarly, Patsy thought. Had she been able to keep her mind on it, she would have worried, but the state of the car she was driving was the last thing on her mind. It was as if Roger’s death had caused all the silt and sediments of uncertainty to sift out of her emotions; they were a pure water as she drove. For the long hundred-mile stretch of the freeway that cut through the pine forests from Houston to Madisonville she was happy in the drive, the sun and blue sky and bright green of the trees all pleasing to her. Occasionally she tilted her head to the side and let her hair tickle Davey, who giggled and shoved her away. But mostly she just drove, and she scarcely looked around when he grew fretful with his car seat and Juanita took him out. He wailed deafeningly for ten miles and then went to sleep. She drove, untouched by Davey’s wails or Juanita’s worries. It was pleasant to drive and her destination and her reason for going were not in her mind, either.

But when she left the freeway and drove through the opening country Roger did come to her mind. That he was dead came to her mind—the country brought the fact in now and then. Some horses standing on a hill, a gray farmhouse standing in isolation far off the road, the pickups parked at a country store at a little crossroads community—such things reminded her. After three hours, when she was beyond the heavy forests, the loosening and spreading of the land itself as it began its long roll westward toward the plains, that too reminded her. She would cross a roll of land and see farther than she had seen in months, see the land spreading away for thirty miles under the gathering afternoon clouds, colder land than the forests and covered still with winter grass. When she thought of Roger her eyes filled—not really from pain, but from a kind of sorrow, sorrow that she had not gone to see him again, sorrow that she would not talk with him again. Of all the people she missed in life there was suddenly one that she must miss forever. No more words would pass between them. It was an awful thought.

“We cry but it does them no good,” Juanita said nervously. Crying was for the house, to her mind, not for a crowded highway.

“I’m not crying for him,” Patsy said calmly. “He was happy enough. I wish he had lived until Davey was older.”

And she glanced back at Davey, asleep on his stomach on the seat, his face mashed into the crack of the seat and one foot bare. He would not remember the old man who had taken him riding; that would belong to her and not to him.

She decided to spend the night in Dallas and drive on to the funeral in the morning. At dinner, offhandedly, in telling her mother and father what kind of man Roger Wagonner had been, she mentioned that he had left his ranch to Jim and herself. To her surprise, instead of seeing it as a generous but, all circumstances considered, reasonable act, they both became terribly upset, particularly when she told them she would probably spend a day or two there, seeing what shape things were in and what the details of the inheritance really were.

“But he was not really related to you,” Jeanette said. “Why would he leave his land to you?”

“He had no one else. Besides, he left it to both of us, not just to me.”

“Well, it seems to me Jim is the one who ought to be looking into it,” Garland said stiffly. “You don’t know anything about things like that and besides it won’t look good. If you ask me you ought to call him.”

“I mean to, but it’s two hours earlier there. He’s barely off work. He’s not likely to come, though. I can do it. It should be fairly simple. After all, I’ll be there.”

Jeanette, to Patsy’s surprise, was extremely flustered. “But you aren’t related to him,” she said again. “I’m sure it won’t seem the usual thing at all, to the people who knew him. I think your father just means it would be better if you waited until some time when Jim is with you.”

“Why?” Patsy asked. “I thought I explained to you that so far as I know, Jim won’t be with me any more. I simply have to do things on my own now.”

Then it dawned on her what they were upset about—that the townspeople would construe it that she had somehow seduced Roger in order to get the land. Her parents thought that people would see her as a siren who had appeared at the eleventh hour and acquired all an old man had worked for all his life. The recognition of how they assumed people would look at it made her white with anger, and she put down her fork.

“You never fail, do you?” she said. “Why did you have to think that? Do I look that bad? Why did you have to think that?”

The sight of her anger was enough to switch her parents’ mood. They instantly decided their apprehensions had been ridiculous, but the damage had been done, so far as Patsy was concerned.

“His own sister told me she was glad about it,” she said. “I don’t care what you think people might think about
me
, but what do you think people think about
him?
He lived there all his life. Do you think people saw him as a fool? Or a lecher? He was a fine man.”

“Well, we just didn’t know him,” Garland said, very humble pie. “If we had we wouldn’t have said it.”

Patsy was so disturbed that she decided not to spend the night. Her anger wore off, but she didn’t want to be exposed to her parents’ way of thinking through the evening. Before she left, her parents had become so apologetic about it all that she was doubly glad to be leaving.

But once she got out of Dallas into the open country she almost regretted her haste and her moodiness. Driving at night by herself was very different from driving in the daytime with Davey and Juanita. She had never driven any distance alone at night. At Denton she turned off the big well-trafficked highway onto a small state road and for a stretch of thirty miles was almost the only car in sight. After the rush of traffic out of Dallas, the road seemed very silent. The Ford’s radio had long since ceased to work, so she hadn’t even that company. The Ford itself was still making peculiar sounds, and she couldn’t help wondering what she would do if it broke down. She saw now and then the yellow light of a farmhouse window off the road, but couldn’t really imagine herself walking across the fields to such a house. There would be giant dogs, probably. On the other hand, she didn’t want to stand by the road and present herself to the uncertain mercies of midnight travelers. She felt frightened just driving, and it annoyed her. After weeks alone she should be above such girlishness. But in Houston there were houses, not dark fields and pastures, and street lights at a comfortable height on the corners, not the countless cold stars far above. When she had driven the West with Jim, the vastness and the stars at night had delighted her, but with Jim she had felt safe within the car, and alone she didn’t feel safe at all. What the whole evening had done was persuade her again that she needed a man. She wished Jim had been home for her calls. The inheritance, contrary to what she had said, might have been just the thing to bring him back. At that moment she wanted him back. Perversely, once it was too late, her parents’ flusterments seemed quite natural. What
would
people think when she popped in the day of the funeral to inquire about her land?

In a town called Bowie she stopped at a filling station to consult her map. The little town of Thalia, where Roger was to be buried, was so small she wanted to be sure she wouldn’t miss it. She got out and asked the attendant, a young man in a Levi jacket, if he would please look under her hood and tell her if anything was drastically wrong. He immediately informed her that she needed a new fan belt and went off to see if he had one that would fit. The wind from the north swept across the bare bright concrete, very cold; after shivering for a minute Patsy decided to wait inside in the warm office. It was heated by a gas stove, the flames flickering and blue, and was so warm that the plate-glass windows had fogged over. The lights outside were a strange blur. She decided she wanted a Coke and while the young man changed her fan belt she sat on a small iron bridge chair, all the paint worn off, sipping a Coke and eating a package of cheese crisps. There was a radio on the desk next to the green credit-card machine, and it was playing a hillbilly song. A late-night high-watt station in Fort Worth was trying to sell an album of hillbilly favorites from yesteryear, fifty songs for two ninety-eight. The album was called
The Teardrop Special
. She heard “Take These Chains from My Heart,” and then the announcer went into a three- or four-minute spiel about the album. The announcer was everybody’s friend and had always been everybody’s friend: