The Farmer's Daughter (8 page)

That settled that and Montana began to drift away. The sense of an idyll was broken in the middle of the moonlit night. She was trying to sleep facing east but the moon was enormous and not looking particularly friendly. She got up and drew the curtains but they were thin and only slightly diffused the light and actually made the moon look larger. Her life had been comparatively uneventful and now it was too eventful. In the dark she could perceive that what we have is the life of the mind and now it was whirling and humming like an old-fashioned top that you pumped. These so-called big decisions like coming to Arizona were essentially out of her control and had been made for her by Frank and Rebecca. Of course she could refuse but what were her options? She could wait for news of a full scholarship to Missoula or Bozeman. The principal had said there was a good chance but she had the feeling that she had painted herself into a corner in Montana. And maybe if she headed south the image of Karl would fade. And her disordered mind had its own sound effects. Wherever she drove with Marcia she was forced to listen to Patsy Cline and Merle Haggard on the eight-track tape deck. In the nighttime she could hear Cline's clear voice singing, “I Fall to Pieces” and “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me” and some Haggard line to the effect that the singer had turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole. Terry was always saying that our bodies were our prisons. What if she spent her life in a real prison for shooting Karl?

One of Rebecca's Labs, she couldn't tell which, came into the bedroom, jumped onto the bed, and curled up next to her hip. Putting a hand on his chest and feeling his heartbeat calmed her as it did with Rover. She began to sleep fitfully but then after midnight when the moon had moved away from her window she awoke sobbing and screaming and the dog began barking. She was having a nightmare where Karl was eating her bare left foot and leg and the white bones were sticking out. He was moving upward in huge ripping bites. Rebecca came running and turned on the overhead light. Sarah was now weeping and thrashing around on the bed with her eyes wide open but not seeing. Rebecca dragged her off the bed into an upright position and walked her up and down the room until she recovered true consciousness but, doubting that it would work quickly enough, led Sarah from room to room in the house turning on the lights as they went, backing out of the darkish but moonlit patio when Sarah stiffened.

It was the piano that worked and perhaps the sunburst color of the walls and the many potted desert plants. Rebecca put Sarah on the piano stool and asked her to play some Schumann.

“Schumann's too scary. I only play him in the daylight,” Sarah said, beginning to play Schubert. She played at least an hour by which time Rebecca and the dogs were asleep on the sofa. Sarah put an afghan throw over Rebecca thinking that she wished Rebecca were her mother but then it was too late to have a mother.

At midmorning they drove to the Desert Museum. For an hour Sarah was startled enough by the flora and fauna to forget everything else but what she was seeing and thinking which was that maybe game biology or botany might be better to study than the safety of dry, cold metallurgy.

Rebecca had to teach a seminar about the mathematics of astronomy so Sarah wandered around the U of A campus thrilled at the number of Asian, black, and Latin students she saw after being raised in ethnically monochromatic Montana. The buildings were intimidatingly big and grand and she questioned why they needed such expensive buildings to learn. She walked sleepily up to a noodle shop on Campbell and ate a bowl of duck soup which would have been better with the wild mallards Tim used to shoot. After the nightmare and the piano she had only dozed with the bed lamp on rather than chancing the continuation of the nightmare. She read some from Hemingway's Islands in the Stream and didn't much care about the story but loved the descriptions of the Gulf Stream. She couldn't fathom why Terry was so fond of Hemingway when she would rather read Faulkner or Steinbeck or dozens of others. Some books crossed her teenage intemperance. She wondered why the heroine of Madame Bovary didn't shoot herself or take a boat to America.

On the way back to Rebecca's office she saw a big ungainly boy who reminded her of Karl. It occurred to her that if she got caught for shooting Karl she wouldn't get to identify all of those bizarre desert plants she'd seen near the museum. This contrasted bleakly with the fresh urgency of shooting him after the vividness of the nightmare.

Back at Rebecca's in the late afternoon she slept for several hours waking at twilight to hear a number of voices in the distance and the piano playing Stravinsky quite well. She had awakened with confused thoughts of normalcy, the perhaps imagined normalcy seen in other people. There was a family story about Rebecca's marriage which had lasted only a week. Her hot-tempered young husband had hit her after they returned from their five-day honeymoon in New York City. He had wanted to go to Miami. She immediately went to the police with her black eye and pressed charges. The parents of both families tried to talk her out of the divorce or annulment, Sarah had forgotten which. They said the husband deserved another chance to which she replied, “No one deserves to hit me even once.” Rebecca was thought to be eccentric in the old neighborhood because after the parting with the wife beater she went on to get a PhD at MIT, a far reach for a girl with a truck-farmer father.

Sarah thought about the story in the shower looking down at her rough hands which didn't go with her smooth and supple body. What was the point in being attractive? With the shower off she could hear a beautifully done Villa-Lobos piece. She hurriedly dressed and met three of Rebecca's friends in the kitchen, two male astronomers and a female artist, but was in a rush to get to the pianist who turned out to be an exchange professor in botany, a Mexican about thirty-five from Guadalajara named Alfredo. He had a soft, lilting, accented voice and seemed to be gay, she thought, which certainly was the last thing that mattered to her. He began teaching her a four-hand piece (Schubert's Fantasy in F Minor) and they played for nearly three hours breaking briefly for dinner. This was the first man in her life that thoroughly captivated her short of Montgomery Clift in The Misfits. That night, not surprisingly, she heard Schubert in her dreams. Alfredo had to teach in the morning but would come out in the afternoon to take a walk and play the piano. He was bringing some botany books and said that if she studied them hard, he would get her into an advanced course of his in the fall. She was crestfallen when he said he would be in Tucson only one more year.

The next morning at breakfast Rebecca teased her a little which wasn't welcome. Sarah alternated between feeling dreamy and antsy. She wanted to ask Rebecca about Alfredo but was too timid.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Not really, just a friend who is a boy.” She found herself telling Rebecca about her friendship with old Tim and then Terry and Marcia. All the other boys in school were nitwits and she had never felt romantic about Terry.

“Alfredo's a little old for you,” Rebecca teased. “I think he's in his late thirties. He was married once and I know he has a daughter but I'm unsure about his sexual taste.”

The blood rushed to Sarah's face and she pretended to be interested in a bird that had landed in the pyracantha tree and was singing beautifully.

“That's a canyon wren. It's my favorite song,” Rebecca said.

Rebecca had to go in to the university so Sarah took the dogs for a walk in the hills and sparse forest at the end of the road. She was immersed in something her dour history teacher had said about how certain minorities like blacks and Indians didn't have much in the way of political empathy for each other. Soon she was lost in a long arroyo and fearful that she wouldn't make it back for Alfredo's arrival. A strong cool wind from the north came up and the dogs ran off chasing a jackrabbit. There was a lump of despair in her throat but then the dogs returned and she said, “Let's go home,” like she did with Rover when she was lost. The dogs turned in what she thought was an unlikely direction but they were right as Rover always was.

Alfredo brought her a large bouquet of cut flowers and she was a little dizzy looking for a vase. He put the flowers on the piano and they began working on four-hand compositions of Mozart's and then Fauré's. They broke for sandwiches and coffee and he asked her to tell him about her life. She did so and he said, “It's time for you to get out of there.” He said the same had been true about himself. His family and their relatives were prosperous farmers about fifty miles from Guadalajara but all he'd wanted to do was play the piano so his parents had sent him off to Juilliard in New York City when he was sixteen. At Juilliard it was finally determined that his hands were too small for him to become a top-notch pianist. His only other interest was plants so he went to Cornell and “froze his ass” for eight years until he had a PhD in botany. He had been married for a couple of years to a rich, spoiled landowner's daughter but they had divorced. He had a thirteen-year-old daughter who went to a private boarding school in Los Angeles.

They were both melancholy about their stories and then he suddenly laughed and played a mocking version of the dirgelike “Volga Boatmen,” and quoted a line of Lorca's in Spanish translating it as “I want to sleep the dream of apples far from the tumult of cemeteries.”

“Let's take a walk. I have to give an evening speech to old-lady cactus gardeners and I'd rather stay here.”

They walked with the dogs for a half hour and he named the wild flora they were seeing then said good-bye at the car. When he smiled he reminded her of the Mexican cowboy who had brought the horse to the Lahren ranch.

“Rebecca said you weren't sure. Will I see you in the fall?”

“If you want to.”

“You're too young to say that.” He shook a finger at her.

“No I'm not. I'm older than you in most ways,” she laughed.

She watched him drive off with a palpable tremor, clear evidence to her that she was acting crazy and should dampen her own spirits. Inside she looked at the three botany textbooks he'd left behind for her. Inside one the bookplate was a small reproduction of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus and underneath he had written, “Dear Sarah, So good to meet you,” which, though it said nothing, she grasped to her being.

Chapter 12

The descent into Bozeman was tummy-clenching with high winds causing the plane to pitch and shudder, and the view out the tiny window blinded by snow. Sarah liked the irony that it was April Fools' Day and the Montana weather was cooperating with the calendar. She was hoping to do her reconnaissance of Meeteetse in a few days but the weather would have to clear for the long drive. She was enervated because her sleep had been unkind to her. She hadn't actually seen Karl in her dreams but his presence was as malevolent as the coldest wind in the world. He was hiding in the forest behind Tim's cabin and was going to shoot and eat both Rover and Lad. She couldn't find the cartridges for her .30-06 and she knew she had bought three boxes with twenty shells in each in preparation for her trip to Meeteetse. At the hardware store she had envisioned the exit wound along Karl's spine as looking like a red basketball. As the plane taxied she was disturbed that Alfredo hadn't even touched so much as her hand.

Marcia was there waiting for her having volunteered for the chore. She was a babbling brook and Sarah struggled to keep up with what she was saying. Priscilla had OD'd on her mother Giselle's tranqs and was at a care facility in Helena. Marcia's speech had always been colorful and was especially so with her obsessive interest in all things sexual. She said that “that bubble-butted whippet sophomore Karen” who ran the hundred on the track team had told her minister's wife that her uncle, the town banker, had been “tinkering” with her since she was ten and the minister's wife had told the sheriff who had tried to hush it up but failed. No one knew what was going to happen but everyone in the county knew the story.

There were a lot of semis collected along the shoulder at the bottom of Butte Pass in the drifting snow and it took Marcia a full half hour to get over the top in low-range four-wheel drive. They talked to a state cop at the interchange of Interstates 90 and 15 and decided to head south for thirty miles in the gathering dark and spend the night in Melrose where the weather wasn't supposed to be quite as violent. They checked into a cabin at the Sportsman's Lodge and Marcia revealed a fifth of schnapps she had swiped from her dad's workshop. Her dad was always sure that it was one of her two brothers who did the deed. Marcia had a stiff drink and Sarah a small one and then Marcia began laughing and told her that Terry had arranged a mirror in his bedroom so he could watch them making love but Marcia had ruined it by laughing. She was so much taller than Terry and also outweighed him. She told Sarah that it looked in the mirror like some big Catholic priest was raping a little altar boy. Sarah found the image terribly ugly but Marcia continued laughing and said, “I might have to pick on someone my own size.”

They walked a hundred yards in the blowing snow to a bar and restaurant that actually had a hitching post for horses in the front. The place was owned by a second cousin of Marcia's and was filled with cowboys, ranchers, and townspeople who all appreciated the moisture the snow was bringing which would help the spring grass after a fairly dry winter. Wet, heavy snow in April translated into weight gain for cattle on which the economy of the area depended.

Sarah was lost in her peculiar inner space so Marcia ordered her chicken-fried steak in creamy gravy and real mashed potatoes. Sarah could only deal with a third of the massive portion but Marcia finished it in a trice. The lovely waitress Nicole told Sarah that the two of them could be related. They had the same olive skin and light brown hair. Sarah was distracted by a memory of singing a song with her grandpa with the line, “If I had the wings of an angel over these prison walls I would fly,” which reflected on the idea that if she got caught shooting Karl she might never see Alfredo again. When her grandpa taught her the song at the piano she was only five and didn't yet know what the word “prison” meant. When he'd died of a heart attack in his commercial truck garden she had looked at him in his casket at the funeral home and had sung in a whisper, “Wake up, sleepyhead.”