What Love Sees (26 page)

“In fact I want you to take a picture of us like that, Dody. Chiang and Jean in bed, me on the floor.”

He’s still talking. Good. They hadn’t heard the meat flop. She bent down and reached out along the floor. Nothing. She had to find it. She had nothing else to serve. Good thing Chiang was asleep or she’d find it first. Her throat constricted and she put the serving plate on the floor, lifted her skirt above her knees, kneeled down and patted around on the floor with her hands. She felt a fine grit on the linoleum. The refrigerator hummed, rattled, and then stopped. Dear Lord, don’t let anyone get curious and open the swinging door. Eventually she found the steak, but what shape was it in? Just how dirty was it? She couldn’t be sure. The floor was covered with Santa Ana dust. The day had raced by and she had no time for floor cleaning. Gingerly, she tried exploring the hunk of meat with her fingers to detect any disaster, but it was too hot to touch. There was only one thing to do. She stabbed the meat again, flopped it back on the serving plate, stood up, rinsed her hands quickly and delivered it to the table.

If Dody noticed, she had the courtesy not to mention it. Now
that
was friendship.

Chapter Twenty-one

“She could really make it come on hot. War or no war, give me a Jap woman any day.”

Jean raised her head. Earl Duran’s words coming through the open window shocked her, incongruous in his colorless, off-key voice. Forrest laughed roughly, in a way she hadn’t heard before, but when he came inside, his voice was velvet.

“Jeanie, where are you?”

“Here. You were gone a long time.”

“That crazy old Indian still can’t drive. He doesn’t know first gear from reverse.”

“I thought you said he was a teamster?”

“Did. But he drove a team and wagon.”

“Then how does he manage a truck?”

“We do it together. I work the gears and pedals and he steers and talks to me.” Forrest let out a smug little grunt. “There’s more than one way—”

“Forrest, you never told me you did that!”

“Earned ten big ones today at the Bradley place. I can’t have the governor think I married you just for your money. I’ve got to earn you new every day, Jeanie.” Smelling of hay and sweat, he kissed her just below the left eye.

“Forrest, what were you and Earl talking about just now?”

“I guess my letters about a job worked.”

When Forrest didn’t want to talk about something, he didn’t, and that was that.

“After we came back from putting up Bradley’s hay, we stopped at the feed store. Whiting found out about a job loading grain at the depot. Work for three. Shoveling grain from a rail car into gunny sacks and sewing ’em up. Earl and I grabbed at it and the Bradley kid did, too.”

“That’s good, I suppose, but when are you going to do it?”

“At night. Seven to eleven or so.”

He was a tornado of energy, rarely home, always hiring out to other ranchers for odd jobs, and now this. Meanwhile Jean contributed to the new Holly economy in the only way she knew, with scant dollars collected each month from giving music lessons.

The first Ramona Christmas was meager, differing from other days of the week only in the big breakfast gathering at Mother Holly’s with Helen and Don, and Lance and Mary Kay there, too. Forrest had said he wanted to spend the day at home, just the two of them, like a normal married couple. Jean made a ham. A little dry, but adequate. She gave him a sweater she’d knit. He gave her Evening in Paris perfume. That was all. Then came the restless quiet of a long, uneventful afternoon. It was wild, cold, and blowy outside. The wind sliced through clapboard joints and curled under doorsills, but there was no snow. There was no tree, no big family dinner, no gathering of cheering voices, no piney fragrance or smell of molasses and cinnamon from the Indian pudding. She tried to remember some Christmas carols to play on the piano, but without voices to accompany them, the melody sounded thin.

She thought of how, as children, she and Lucy would race over to Tready’s after the formal, slow-paced opening of presents, how itchy she would be to see what Tready got, and how Tready would always come back to Hickory Hill. She’d go through the presents one by one, taking things out of boxes and putting them carefully back in. But telling Forrest about it all would only underscore the sparseness here.

A long, newsy letter from her parents wished them a happy day and said they’d come to visit in February to see what they needed and have Christmas then. Mother Holly had read it to her the day before. She wished she could hear it again. Besides a letter from Icy a week earlier, only one other piece of mail had arrived.

Forrest paced around the house. “Do you want to open Dudley’s present?” His voice sounded tentative, almost shy. He handed her a box still wrapped in heavy paper and twine, from Uncle Dudley in Connecticut. The two sat side by side on the picnic bench in the kitchen. She explored the package, feeling the bow and ripping the paper slowly, as if to prolong the experience.

“What is it?” Forrest asked. It was his child voice, all soft and wondrous.

“Stockings. Silk stockings.” She counted. “Twelve pairs. Poor dear Uncle Dudley. He doesn’t know. What am I ever going to do with twelve pairs of silk stockings out here? They run if you even look at them wrong.” Her voice rose to a squeak. The inappropriateness of her only gift from home struck wide the chasm of difference, and she cried with a suddenness that unleashed weeks of tiny, unspoken aches. Opera and black velvet capes and dinners in the Village and taxis on Madison Avenue and the hush before the first chord at the Hartford Symphony and Farmington Country Club parties—where was all that now? That’s the world silk stockings belonged to, not the world of turkeys and pastures and Indians and dirty stories.

She knew Forrest guessed what she was thinking when he enfolded her in his arms. For a long time he cradled her, letting her cry, not trying to stop it, just holding her, quiet and still. She drew in her breath in a series of little inward gasps. “But, Forrest, I want to be here. I chose this and I don’t want what I had. I want you and us and life. Here.”

But the great gulf in her life and the pain it created was no longer private, and she wept for the sorrow the revelation caused him. She thought it probably was a relief for him, too, when the Ingraham clock struck ten and they could go to bed.

The next day dawned cold and damp. The air felt wet, smelled wet, even tasted wet. “It feels like New England,” Jean said.

“Weather for a jacket,” Forrest said, “or a bear.” He opened the door, ready to do the milking. “Must be foggy.” He stood at the door for some moments letting cold air seep into the house. Jean shivered. Then he closed the door and turned back inside. Jean felt his arms go around her, drawing her to him carefully, slowly. “You’re a treasure, Jeanie, maybe a little too delicate for out here, but you’ll grow. We both will.”

She pressed her face into his chest.

“Maybe that’s what marriage will do,” he said softly, “stiffen you into manhood and gentle me into a softer womanhood.” He kissed her, lightly at first, but then firmly, opening her mouth, welding the two together, seeking some union, seeking the assurance that in spite of yesterday she was his. She knew she was, but maybe he didn’t. “How about if I quit early today so we can take a walk?” He spoke his offering softly. “You can learn what’s here around you. We can walk up the road and you can meet Karl and Heddy at the chicken ranch. They’re nice folks and you could stand to have a few friends here. Or we can go over and sit at Indian Rock. Or anything you want to do.” He kissed her again on her forehead and went out the door.

Jean waited longer than other days for him to come back from milking. The fog muffled the usual morning noises and left her utterly alone. It was a striking thing he’d said—stiffen her into manhood and gentle him into womanhood. At first she wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. This was a different side to him, more introspective. It wasn’t the funny, exaggerated western speech he liked to imitate, but something much deeper. He’d never shown it before, and it gave her hope. She shivered and put on a sweater.

She made the bed and got breakfast ready. Not a sound from him. She fed Chiang. Still no Forrest. What if something happened? He was accustomed to walk the property by himself—their two acres, the ten-acre pasture, the barn, Mother Holly’s, Lance’s turkey ranch—all without help, yet he’d always come back before this. She could call Lance or Mother Holly, but if he were just talking to someone, she’d feel silly for causing an alarm. Or if he just wanted to be alone, that would be worse. She’d wither from embarrassment. Nothing to do but wait. She sorted the laundry. She turned up the oil stove in the living room and pulled up the wicker chair to read, but her fingers halted over the same line again and again.

A distant, hollow whistling came through the fog. She jumped up. When the door opened, she smelled a foul odor like sewage or rotting meat.

“Forrest?”

“Boy, am I glad to see you, Jeanie baby.”

“What happened?”

“Fell in a well.” His voice had none of the velvety smoothness of earlier that morning.

“You what?”

“I fell into a pit I dug once.” He sounded agitated that he had to repeat it.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Just let me get out of these clothes. I smell like a cow’s catook.” She heard him yanking off his clothes right on the porch. “A couple of years ago Lance and I dug a well in the pasture about 300 yards from here, dug it 25 feet deep, but it never gave any water so we put barbed wire around it and used it for a trash dump. Threw in tin cans and tree branches and a dead calf once and turkeys whenever they died. I forgot it was there, I guess.” His voice trembled, like a phonograph record going too slow.

“How could you fall in if you had barbed wire around it?

“I thought it was the wire at the other end of the pasture.” His voice cracked. “Wasn’t concentrating, I guess.” She understood only too well. Disorientation. “It was partly broken down, and I thought the cattle had broken over it and had gotten into the next field. All I thought of was what a hard job it would be to find ’em now and drive ’em back. I guess I spit a few words at ’em when I climbed over the fence. Next thing I knew, I was in the bottom.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No. Maybe scratched up some. It was a good thing we’d thrown a lot of junk in there. I don’t think I fell more than 15 feet.”

“How did you get out? Who helped you?”

“Nobody. If I yelled, nobody could hear me, so I began feeling my way around in there. There were a lot of branches over me I’d fallen through. I felt some things I wish I hadn’t, too. When I cleared the branches above me, a lot of stuff fell down on me. I don’t what to guess what. The top six or seven feet of the well is square, faced with boards. Where the square part joins the round part there’s a little corner ledge.” His voice cracked again, this time to a falsetto. “I don’t know how, but I pulled myself up on that and then found the edges of those boards and dug my hands in to pull me the rest of the way.”

Jean wanted to hug him but was afraid to. He smelled awful. “I’m glad you’re okay.” Unnecessary to say, but she said it anyway. She felt his panic. She relived it with him as he bathed, as they took a walk to Indian Rock and to the neighbors’ chicken ranch. It made her feel ashamed for crying the day before. After all, he was struggling, too, working until eleven every night, getting up early every morning, facing a world no easier than hers. And still he whistled on his way back from the well. Perhaps there had been a tone of desperation in that whistle, but it was whistling nonetheless. Alice was right when she said he must do it to keep from crying.

Chapter Twenty-two

Father’s presence shrank the house. Everything Forrest and Jean did, all they had accomplished, just living actually, seemed inconsequential and provincial when they showed it to him. Not that he said anything critical. And certainly Forrest didn’t seem to feel that way. Maybe it was just her.

The first afternoon Forrest took them around the ranch, to the barn, to Mother Holly’s, even up to visit Heddy and Karl. “Yeesus Christ, Forrest,” Karl said in front of everybody. “You didn’t tell me you was bringing the governor. We might have swept out the place first.” Jean forced a little laugh.

On the way back she whispered to Forrest not to take them to Lance and Mary Kay’s turkey ranch.

“Why not? That’s part of the family.”

“But it’s—well, not very nice. You said so yourself.”

He did anyway. “It’s too cold. I’m not going,” Jean said loudly. She turned what she thought was vaguely the direction of the house. “Forward,” she told Chiang.

They got through dinner without any greater disaster than Mother telling her she took too much off when she peeled the potatoes. When was the last time Mother peeled potatoes? And of course Father missed his cocktail. At least he had his pipe. Still, she knew her wedding damask didn’t hide the rough redwood picnic table underneath.

When Earl stopped by after dinner to talk about digging a well, Forrest invited him in and introduced him. “Oh, I remember you, ma’m. Evening to you.” Even with the piano bench, Jean knew there weren’t enough places to sit, so she began to drag one of the picnic benches from the kitchen into the living room. Earl saw what she was doing and hurried to help.

“Father, you sit in the wicker chair,” Jean said. “Hardly like your green leather one, but it’ll have to do.”

“This is just fine, Jean,” Mother said quickly.

“We’re going to get you some furniture,” Father said. “This trip. For Christmas. A nice sofa and maybe even a leather chair. And anything else you need.”

“Nothing else can fit in,” Jean said. She was tempted to give him a quick hug, but he wasn’t the hugging sort. And she didn’t want to fumble for him. She went back into the kitchen to finish the dishes. Mother followed. “I don’t want you to do anything, Mother. Just visit.” Jean tried to listen above the dishwashing sounds and Mother’s news of Lucy and home to the conversation in the living room. She could tell Father was trying to be cordial, asking conventional, get-acquainted questions about home and family.