The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (2 page)

After he came I couldn't keep a mind to things. Even the chores I normally liked—watering the chickens, chopping back the galloping weeds—didn't keep my attention, and I made careless mistakes, spilling kerosene and leaving the lamp out overnight, the kind of mistakes my sisters made. Me, the sharpest of Pa's girls. I dawdled and sighed and drifted, thinking shapeless white and blue thoughts, and later when Mama asked where the eggs were, I couldn't tell her. I was unsettled, as nervy as a horse when a big storm is coming in. The horizon remained placid, without new wind or the purple blur of thunderheads, but that steadiness was no comfort. Something had slipped into me and burrowed down, and now I scratched and twisted, miserable in my skin.

Pa could see my distraction. I was never able to hide anything from the man if he wanted to look, and ever since the dinner with Reverend Farley he kept me close to hand. The Tuesday after the reverend's visit, he took me out to the barn. Doing chores with him meant I didn't have to make dinner, but it also meant Pa had something he wanted to say, so it was hard to know whether I felt freed or trapped. "Did you call me out here because you're wanting a piece of meat tonight that's cooked all the way through?" I said.

"You're a stubborn thing." He handed me the flat tin of barn salve that we used on all the cows' cuts and wounds. The salve had been white once, but it had aged to a thick yellow and smelled like bad cooking fat laced with kerosene. The barn stank whenever we opened the tin, and this summer we had to open it a lot. Both our cows were eaten up by biting flies, their rumps pink with weeping, crusted sores. The cows could hardly stand to be touched, even to be milked, and their lowing was full of long misery. They were normally sweet-tempered animals, but in a minute one of them would try to nip us while we kept dabbing on the sticky ointment. Pa said, "You could make things easy, but you won't do it."

"What's easy?" The smell of the greasy salve stuck to me. The cow twitched her flat rump and huffed irritably.

"Girls half your age can manage to make a loaf of bread that doesn't come up gummy in the middle."

"It's a knack. I haven't got it."

"I think we all can see that much." He reached across the cow's back to flick a bit of salve from my face. "Girl, what do you want?"

If Pa had looked mean or angry, I would have known what to say, but his face was stony. Mostly, I was aware of the rich, sweet smell of the cows, the tang of manure, and the acrid medicine that was smeared halfway up to my elbows now. "I like to sew."

"I went to town last week. Jack Plat asked after you. His daddy's spread is bigger than this one."

Everybody's spread was bigger than ours. Pa knew that I knew that. My hands shook a little when I said, "What did you tell him?"

"I told him you were tolerable."

"You don't help a girl much, do you?"

"I don't see as that's my job." Jack Plat's daddy's three hundred acres spilled between us. The Plats had a house with a window, and it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to look outside of a house during the daylight. Pa said, "What should I have told him, Nell? That you spent half an evening looking at a pot lid as if it could tell you something?"

"No, don't tell him that."

"Jack'll come to see you, if I don't stop him."

"That's what people do, I think. They come to see each other."

"I'm only going to ask you this once. Is Jack what you want?"

He let me take my time. Jack was a new thought. Marriage was a new thought, though it shouldn't have been. Just last month, the reverend read out Nussine and Ernold's banns while Nussine sat like the queen of Sheba in the front row, thinking on babies, Ernold's wood-frame house, and a new wringer-washer. She wasn't but a month older than me. Unbidden images tumbled through my head: Berlinda and Marlon Mallory ran off to Hutchinson to get married, and for months after they came back, Berlinda told about the hotel there, and the wide streets.

"No one has called on Mae yet," I said unsteadily.

"There's no law."

"It wouldn't be easy here, just her and Viola." Mae was already seventeen, but little Vi was only nine, and not handy.

"We'll manage. Listen up, Nell—if you don't want Jack, I'll tell him."

Mrs. Jack Plat. Jack was shorter than me, with bandy legs and hair so curly that we used to say
baa
to him in school. He had stopped school at twelve, rather than boarding in Hays for high school, but I saw the Plats at church and in town; a person had to put his mind to it to disappear in Mercer County. Like everyone, I knew that Jack's mother was a tyrant, his father a quiet man who stayed out of his wife's way. Even at church Orris Plat could find a way to stay on the other side of the building from her, a skill we all admired.

Jack favored his mother, and I wondered whether that should worry me. His lamblike curls were hers, and his strut, and his quick, cutting words when he was exercised. But he had once spent better than an hour flat on his belly under an outhouse, coaxing two kittens to come to him. He must have washed them, because when he brought them home in a basket they were as fluffy as kittens on a greeting card, and he talked his mother into keeping them. I hadn't seen any of this, but everybody knew the story. I would learn other stories, different ones, if I lived in the Plat place.

"He's nice enough," I said.

"I won't stop you," Pa said. "I just want you to think."

"What's to think about?"

"Once you decide, you've decided. You can't come up for air later and say, 'Gaw,
that
was a mistake.' So think. Is this what you want out of your future?"

"Future's a hard thing to see." I presumed that Pa was thinking about me squinting across the top of the pot lid. I could still see that wavery line, full of possibility.

"You better can."

"Did you, when you courted Mama?"

The rough bristles of the cow's tail whipped me under the ear. "That'll be a welt," Pa said. He spread more salve, working the yellow ointment down into the little craters that oozed with their own clear juice. "Your mother is a good woman. I couldn't ask for a better one. She knows how to stretch a nickel, and she doesn't hanker after what she can't have."

He wasn't saying anything but the truth. Pa and I were the hankerers.

"She's never raised her voice to me, even when she ought should have," he said. "When I called on her, folks said she was sweet as a honey cake."

I went back over a sore I'd already dabbed. Pa wasn't much on sweets, even Mae's good pies.

"What I'm about to say is not a complaint, you hear me? I esteem your mother. I won't hold with anything else." Now that Pa had stopped touching her backside, Dixie was placid, munching the oats he put out for her. "It's a fine thing to share your days with a person. That's what a marriage is—sharing. You share a home and a place. You share children. But your mother and I don't see the world alike. When I look over the fields, I see fences that need fixing, the place where the seed washed out. She doesn't see those things."

"I know that," I said.

"I'm trying to tell you something. What do you know aboutJack?"

"Same as you. Their place will support another mouth, and his mother's a pistol."

"Not much."

"Where else am I going to go?"

"You're still a youngster. Wait for a feller who you know you like."

"Guess I'll be waiting for Reverend Farley to come back."

"Guess you won't either. Man who lives riding circuit isn't looking for a wife to support. And his jokes were no good."

"Then I guess I'd better let Jack Plat come to call. Since I'm not interested in being a spinster lady." As if it had been waiting for just this moment, my mind produced a list of Mercer County bachelors: Sam Wynn, whose last wife had died in childbirth at age twenty and who held girls too tight at dances; Carth Knoller, who lived in town and ran the post office along with the funeral home; the scattering of ranchers who came in for feed and looked over girls with the same eyes they used for livestock. In that company, Jack looked fine.

"There's no call to rush. You're still half a child."

This was the first time Pa had indicated I was anything but all a child, and hearing him say so brought feeling up in me—something hard, screwed tight. Everyone in Mercer County knew his pride in me, his middle girl, no bigger than a minute but still a firepop. At every funeral or covered supper, people recalled the time a man from the bank came to see Pa. I wasn't much out of diapers and didn't know what they were talking about, but I could see Pa sitting at the edge of the bench like a shamed schoolboy. So I crept up behind the man and bit him on the leg. The man yanked away from me and Pa whooped, saying he'd meant to warn the man about the fice dog. For a long time after that he called me Fice when he was feeling good, though he'd let that drop away lately.

The cow ointment stung my eyes. I said, "I'm not after staying on the smallest ranch in Kansas. I'd like to see something fresh for a change."

He put on a grin I'd never seen before. It looked bashful, and it made the feeling in me tighten even more, like a jar lid twisted until it breaks. He said, "It's not enough for you to see your old Pa?"

"That's the first thing I want to stop seeing," I said, hating the words the second they flew from my mouth. They were not what I meant to say. There were no words for what I meant to say.

Pa's face slammed shut. He pitched the open tin of cow ointment at me; its top side stuck itself square against my nose and eyes, and for a panicky second all I could breathe was old, sticky fat and kerosene.

"—next week," Pa was saying as I shook the tin off. "Tomorrow. I won't have your mother living with a child who doesn't know respect."

"Is there a rag?" I said. The ointment was all over my face and spattered onto my neck and shoulders. I was struggling not to gag. The dress was done for.

He threw a feed sack at me so hard the tie strings whipped my ear. "Mouth on you like an outhouse. No gratitude."

I rubbed the burlap over my face, scraping clots of the ointment that we would need again back into the tin. "I'm guessing Orris Plat doesn't throw cow medicine at anybody."

"I wouldn't bet against his wife's throwing arm, though. Looks like you'll be finding out. You can write a letter and tell us all."

"Are you going to lock me out of the house tonight?"

"I should. But you'll have a home here as long as you want it. And you don't want it."

I stood wiping myself clean until Pa left the barn, the cow making contented grunts. There didn't seem anything wrong with Jack. I was fifteen years old.

Mama was uncomfortable with the notion of my marrying Jack Plat, but I didn't let her trouble me. My distraction had vanished; now my head was full of ideas about how life might look from a different piece of land. Mama would come around. She had not watched a daughter be courted before, and she wasn't easy with new things.

"Wait," she said when she saw me hauling water so I could wash my face. A week had passed since my conversation with Pa, and I had been keeping myself clean. There was no telling when a fellow might come to call. "You washed yesterday. Don't trouble yourself again."

"Now, Mama. I want to place myself next to godliness."

"You're not usually worked up about godliness," she said—a sharp comment for her. I remembered it the next Sunday, when I told her I was going to church.

"There's no need for you to go this week," Mama said. "It's blowy. Stay home and take your ease."

"What if lightning should strike me dead before next week? My eternal soul might be at stake," I said.

"You do not believe that."

"I believe in eternity." The round of chickens to feed was eternal, the cycle of meals was eternal, the pile of overalls to patch and shirts to mend as relentless as the sun jumping into the sky every morning. At sundown, I stared over toward the Plat place. Their house was on a rise, what passed for a hill in Mercer County, and a Plat might watch for a visitor coming to pass the time, or a banker with a business proposition. In truth, I didn't know what a Plat might see, but I liked the idea of a new vista. A different kind of girl might have mooned, imagining Jack looking toward our place and thinking about me, but I wouldn't have wanted such a thought. I did not think about Jack very much, or need to.

Mercer County held forty families, all of us glued together by marriages and loans and memory—the Willoughbys, who'd had a barn raising ten years before, were still delivering thank-you eggs every Saturday. Children born to one branch of a family were raised by cousins who needed an extra set of hands or a boy, and if there was no room for an aging aunt in one house, a bed was found in another. The county was like a house without walls, all of us wandering through each other's lives when we had a need.

There was nothing we didn't know. We noticed the traveling preachers with loose hands and the children who didn't look quite like their daddies. We paid attention to men who bought new wagons while their wives wore feed-sack shifts, and women who swished in new Montgomery Ward crinolines while their children wore through shoes. Arlen Bryce's will hadn't even been properly read before word went around the county about how Arlen had cut his oldest boy out of the estate. News—any news, but especially incomplete news that required a little guesswork—rippled from house to house like brushfire. So when I dressed for church after Mama tried to stop me, taking good care with the rat made out of saved-up strands from my hairbrush to make my hair look full, I wasn't dressing just for Jack Plat. All of Mercer County was looking.

Outside the church door, Jack was waiting in his Sunday suit, badly taken up at the sleeves and cuffs. I could do a better job. Mama watched, one anxious step behind me. As soon as I had announced that I was coming to church, she put up her hair and my sisters crowded to the washstand after me. Nobody could bear to miss a thing.

"I was hoping to see you," he said.

"It's a good day to come out," I said. "Clear. We won't have many more like this."