Wild Life (5 page)

I went on with my writing—Helena not alarmed, the dear girl, inasmuch as she has caught a particular gleam of amusement in the eyes of the noble Tatoosh. The boards of the first-floor staircase tightened and released in a familiar way, and shortly I heard a rattling of the kitchen stove. I considered, and wrote, and considered, and then put my feet to the cold floor and wriggled them, and when they had woken enough to bear my weight, I went stiffly after Melba down the narrow stairs to the kitchen.

She had lit the lamp and stood in its high shadows with a bowl pressed up to her ribs, cutting lard into flour with the blade of a knife. There were winter apples, little yellow knobs withered and spotted with brown, piled up in the sink.

“What are you doing?” I said. It was clear she had begun to make a pie; I expected her to know I was asking another question entirely.

“I am working,” she said sullenly, “as any woman may do at any hour she's so inclined.” Her mouth was drawn up in a little pucker. She had hung her apron from her neck without tying its strings, and much of her hair had escaped a disheveled braid. Horned and yellowing toenails were ranked below the edge of her gown.

“What do you think? That this example will shame me?”

She bristled up, her chin pushing toward me until the crepey skin of her throat was tight on its cords. “I don't think nothing of that, I'm just making a pie, and that's all. Go on back to your own work.” She shook a palmful of water over the dough and drove a fork briskly around the bowl. “Go on,” she said in another minute, without lifting her attention from her work.

I said, as a kind of warning, “Don't expect me to take your pie from the oven, once you have gone off to your bed.”

“I'll get the pie out myself. This is my work, it's nothing to do with you.” Her face had reddened suddenly with the heat of fierce and honest anger. She shoveled flour to the breadboard and tipped the ball of dough onto it, but before taking up the rolling pin she held her bare hands out tenderly for a brief, frowning self-examination. This gesture before beginning one's work always will make me think of Mother, who had the same odd habit, though Melba's hands are small as a girl's, reddened and split and peeling from excessive dryness, and my mother's hands were of another sort, big and blunt and tanned, toughened with callus across the palms and at the joint of the middle finger. In the last year of her life the baby finger of Mother's right hand was crooked and swollen, and I suppose, had she lived into old age, she'd have been troubled with arthritis, but her hands went on seeming to me strong and well made until the day she died. I consider there is something vaguely afflicted about Melba, and when she spreads her small bleeding fingers for that little inspection, I'm inclined to think it arises from her hands.

The air in the kitchen was crackling cold. I went to the stove and shook the wood about, for that stove is pettish, very like a man, and must be coaxed into doing the woman's bidding. When I determined there was sufficient smoke in the room, I took up a paring knife and stood at the sink peeling apples. If this disagreed with Melba, she didn't say. She had by then taken after the dough with the rolling pin, in her typically short, radiating blows.

We are unlike each other and get along chiefly by the favored method of couples who have been long married: there is very little conversation between us. But it's the way of those couples, I suppose, that a small alteration of habit raises a kind of signal of alarm, like the watchman's rattle of the knob.

“How is Henry?” I asked her eventually. Her husband frequents low places and is a pathetic drunkard. She has long since given up living under his roof but goes on delivering his supper on Sunday afternoons, and in addition stopping by to see him on the occasion of any errand that takes her into town, for he lives alone in a rented house not far from the Skamokawa steamer landing.

“As always,” she told me in some disgust. The pie dough had become a great circle, soft and elastic, springing against the pin. She lifted it neatly into the pie tin and began to slice the apples as I peeled them.

“And Harriet?” Until this moment, I had rudely failed to ask for the most recent news of her family; and her granddaughter, Harriet, is frail, a peaked little girl whose skin bruises violet at the mere touch. She is Florence's only child, a thin, shy thing born in the same month and nearly on the same day as Oscar. My older boys often have declared they would have preferred a trade.

Melba pursed her mouth. “She's thin. I would put weight on her if it was up to me.” This was ground we had covered often.

“And how is Florence?”

“Oh, Florence is just fine.” She delivered these words in a mutter which I determined to be begrudging or concealing.

Florence is prone to Female Complaints, and I have released Melba from my house more than once for the stated reason of nursing her daughter back to health; so I pressed Melba on this matter. “Is Florence not feeling well? I suppose you shouldn't have come away if she needed you.” I have a thorough dislike of my housekeeper's absenting herself from my house but never have been among those Utopists who advocate the severing of a woman's ties to her children.

“If they have a need for me to be there, well, then, they'll just have to ask me,” Melba said in a disgruntled way.

“Someone is sick, then? Who is it? Is it Homer?”

She made a quick loud noise, a release of aggravation. “He never goes sick, no, it's not Homer.” Then finally she let loose of the first part of her pent-up news: “He means to take Harriet up in the woods with him come Monday morning and keep her there all the week long, which he evidently has made out to be a great adventure for the child, though up until now he's always said it was a great danger, and his very life on the line from dawn to dark. I argued with Florence over it, but the truth is she has no say in her own house, it's all Homer's way and ever has been. He's evidently determined to do it, and of course he's got Harriet wanting it too, though she'll be among a pack of dirty timber beasts with not a single woman to see that she washes her face and eats proper.”

“Where is this camp of Homer's, Melba?”

She gestured wildly with the paring knife. “Oh, it's way back in
the greenwoods. They was working in the burn, but when the rains come, it got to be all a mud slide, and so they moved far up there on Canyon Crick.”

A great timber industry flourishes in Yacolt just now, but most of it is a frantic rush to salvage dead trees; the great burn of '02 has left that forest over there a wasteland of ash and cinders and blackened poles for twenty-five miles to the east and south, but I took Canyon Creek to lie out in the saved woods.

“Is there not housing for the family men up there? Why is it Florence didn't move up there with him when the camp was moved?”

“Oh, there's homeguards right there in Yacolt as walks out to their work every morning, but he wouldn't have none of that, had to go out in the almighty tules, where there's all men and no whistle to tell them when to eat and when to sleep.”

I don't know Homer well, but my general opinion of men and their childish posturing has not suffered any from the stories Melba has brought down from Yacolt. To marry and make himself the father of a child, and then arrange to keep himself up in the woods among other men for six days out of seven, is entirely the thing a man would do.

“Well, you shouldn't worry,” I said, since the adventure was evidently already decided. “I've never seen a crew of loggers without a soft spot for a child, and I expect they'll watch over her like a spoiled dog. You ought to know she'll never go hungry, for there's more food in a log camp than on a maharani's table.”

Melba had no answer for this, beyond the disgusted expelling of her breath. We went on turning and paring and slicing the apples in silence until she said suddenly—a burst of bitterness—“And his wife. My Florence. In all the months she never has said a word to me about it, I had to see it for myself, that he's got her in a delicate condition. I don't know why I had to learn this like any stranger on the street, and not from my daughter's own mouth.”

Florence, very like her mother, had suffered a hard delivery, and it had been darkly hinted that the Yacolt surgeon had forbidden Homer to share his wife's bed; that Harriet, in the manner of her mother, was to be an only child.

I said, “Well, you shouldn't be surprised a man would put his sexual appetite ahead of his wife's health, Melba.”

I suppose in some domestic novels this frankness of speaking
might have brought on a fainting swoon, but Melba has an unflappable demeanor, and in any case she never has been the sort of person to tie her corset too tight. She is stubborn in her convictions regarding a woman's language, though, and I always expect to be taken to task for my lapses. It was a great surprise when she answered fiercely, “That don't surprise me at all! Men are no different than toms and roosters, when it comes to it! But Florence should have told me he'd gotten another one on her. I'm her mother. I wish she'd told me, and not let it go on like this until I had to see it for myself.”

She never came to the edge of tears, but there was a distress in her voice that I had not looked for. I'm not clever in these cases, but after a bit I said, “Oh, she was just afraid to frighten you, Melba,” and that may have comforted her. She said, “Well, maybe so,” and we lapsed again into silence. She began to pinch up the rim of the pie crust with a fissured, reddened thumb and forefinger. “I'll just sit down here until it comes done,” she said when we had put the pie in the oven, and then she said quietly, “Go on, now,” and her face, which had been drawn up, gave way to tiredness.

I went up the stairs, but I soon came down again and told her from the last step, “Now, Melba, don't be worrying over Florence and Harriet.”

I had surprised her, coming down again; she had already pulled out a kitchen chair and was sitting in it, stroking back the yellowy gray hair from her brow. “No,” she said with a little note of astonishment, and she dropped her hands down in her lap and twisted the chapped fingers together. Her look when it finally passed over me was softly forbearing. “No, I won't if I can help it,” she said, which of course she cannot.

 

Florence

 

As her husband's hands came to her in the darkness, as he came pulling at her nightgown, as he turned her on the bed, the woman whispered briefly not a protest but something like a resigned inquiry. He believed his use of her body was an entitlement, which was something she believed herself. In any case, though he was not generally a brutal man, she had learned that in sexual matters he was deaf to her
objections. In the early days and weeks of their marriage, her repugnance and painful cries had secretly quickened his sexual appetite, so that his possession of his bride had been all but indistinguishable from the rape of an astonished child. Now, after nine years of marriage, she was largely indifferent to the act of copulation, and he accepted her indifference as natural and unavoidable—regrettable only for the loss of a certain heated ferocity.

As he opened her legs and covered her, he said in a hoarse murmur, “Just this once, just this one time,” which was something he said every time, and which he may have meant as a kind of apology; they both had been warned if he got her with child again, it might be the death of her. She had borne him one living child and twice had discharged a formless embryo resembling the infant body of a bird or of a fish. Her husband had pressed his conjugal rights upon her even while she was still shedding blood from those losses, and this may have been the cause of the present troubles with her womb.

As he beat his heavy hips against the open bowl of her pelvis, he began a low brutish grunting such as she had once heard bears make—it might have been bears—in the dark woods where she had played as a child. She lay still and silent beneath her husband, as she had once lain still and silent, alone under the heavy branching trees, waiting to be eaten or taken by the monsters whose heavy dark bodies moving past her, grumbling and gnarling, she had merely glimpsed against the obscurity of the forest; only when his ragged fingernails came scraping at her breasts did a lisping whistle rise through her teeth, a birdlike sound, thin, a woodnote—merely glimpsed.

He had become convinced that he could prevent his wife from suffering further pregnancies by wetting two fingers of his hand with his saliva and swabbing the semen from her vulva after intercourse. In another month it would become apparent to him that she was carrying again, and he would cease this well-meant gesture; but for now he still believed in it, and as soon as he had finished using her he rose to his knees above his wife and ritually cleaned up after himself. The moon lit his wife's pale belly and the pale flesh of her thighs, though not the damp run where his fingers searched, thorough and thoughtful as a man destroying blind whelps in a dark wolfish warren of the earth.

I meant to let the boys run wild while I gave the day over to writing; if we had enjoyed our usual poor weather, all lowering clouds and sheets of rain, I would have held to that intent. But when the fog lifted off the water, it was a fine sunny day, and a scrubbing westerly breeze drove out the frost. In the month of March such days are infinitely rare, a gift of grace and glory, and so the boys and I, together with Stuband and the Eustlers, took a boat up to the mouth of the Elochoman River and spread a picnic lunch on the grass. Melba, on Sundays, is in thrall to the Lutheran Church, and though our little diversion would surely have taken her mind from her worries, she held stubborn against my coaxing and rowed herself to town on the Sunday morning tide, where in the silence of prayer I imagine she fell to contemplating her daughter dead of childbirth and her granddaughter killed by a rolling log. Horace Stuband is a Methodist and a regular churchgoer himself, but the boys evidently persuaded him to thank God for his infrequent gift of fair weather by actually taking pleasure in it. Otto and Edith Eustler, who have the farm northeast of Stuband's, are backsliders from the Catholic Church, and for this, as for their readiness to pack a lunch, they are the perfect picture of good company on a Sunday.