Moving On
Page 6
In a few minutes she heard Roger Wagonner slam the back door and saw him walk through the yard, his milk bucket over his arm. Their green Ford was parked by the back gate. He glanced at it with the curious unbelieving glance people always gave the Ford, as if he was pained and amazed that such a vehicle had been removed from the junkyard where it belonged and parked on his property. The Ford was six years old. Jim had had it four years before they were married. They could easily afford another car, but Jim was sentimental about the Ford and stubbornly refused to sell it. They had discovered each other in the car, and he had got it bound up with their love in some way. They spent their first full night together parked in the Ford on a hill near White Rock Lake, in Dallas, kissing and talking. Patsy was misty enough about the night herself, but not so misty about the Ford that she could ignore the fact that it was falling apart. Only the month before they had been stranded for six hours in a garage in Riley, Texas, with a broken timing gear. “Are we going to keep it all our lives?” she had asked then. She read three magazines and all of Pnin while the Ford sat in a blackened garage full of oilcans. Jim ignored her and talked to the mechanic. “Look, I married you for life,” she said, trying again, once they were on their way back to Dallas. “If we’re going to keep this car as our hearts’ museum or something, we might as well have it bronzed.”
“I fell in love with you in this car,” he said, not impressed with her wit; and they continued to drive it.
The chickens came out to meet Roger, the hens scolding bitterly, and he clucked them out of the way and walked on to the barn through the milky shin-high mist. His pickup was parked between the chicken house and the barn, an ancient Chevrolet twice as old as the Ford, with sideboards that had not been painted in so long that they were gray.
He called to the milk cow and let her and the red calf into the barn. The sun was burning the mist away. When he emerged from the barn he had a full bucket of milk and set it carefully on a wheelbarrow near the lot. He filled a hayrack with yellow hay and got his milk bucket and carried it slowly to the house.
Patsy felt talkative. She laid her book and comb on the window-sill, belted her blue robe about her, and skipped quickly down the stairs to meet him.
“Hi,” she said. “So this is what morning’s like. Want me to help you with breakfast?”
Roger was a tall old man, with hair thin and quite white and so molded to his temples by years of being beneath the same hat that it stayed molded even when he took the hat off.
“Sure, start helping,” he said. He set the heavy milk bucket on the smooth blanched wood of the drain-board. Patsy had watched him strain it through some cheesecloth into a strainer only the evening before, and she determined that straining the milk would be her first rural task. She began to open drawers at random, looking for the cheesecloth.
Roger became nervous as she rapidly progressed through the drawers. He got the cheesecloth, which hung on a towel rack over the sink. “You’re an energetic creature, Patsy,” he said. “Don’t you have no shoes? You been here two days now and I ain’t seen you with shoes on yet.”
Patsy was busy reopening the drawers he had just closed, as she had in mind cooking bacon and wanted a fork to turn it with. She noticed that he was watching her as if he expected to have the entire contents of his cabinets dumped on the kitchen floor, and actually a good number of implements were scattered on the drain-board, but she intended to put them back as soon as she had a chance. The blue milk strainer, an antique almost, stood on the back porch. She held the cheesecloth between her teeth and used both hands to carry the milk bucket out there. How she was going to affix the cheesecloth and pour too she didn’t know, and Roger Wagonner didn’t know either. Whatever he envisioned her doing made him so nervous that he undiplomatically took the bucket and strained the milk himself while she went back and started the bacon frying.
“You don’t trust me,” she said. “You’re perfectly right not to. I don’t know why I think I’m a milkmaid, but it seems a lovely thing to be on a morning like this. I guess I must have read about milkmaids. Thomas Hardy has them in numerous books and they’re always at their best on mornings like this. If we’re going to have biscuits you’ll have to make them and I’ll do the oven part. I’ve never made biscuits from scratch.”
Watching her wandering about the kitchen in her blue robe, standing on one foot now and then to scratch her bare calf with a toe, Roger Wagonner shook his head and resigned himself with a smile to the chaos females bring to an orderly house. Patsy fried the bacon but then sat down at the table to peel an orange and eat it, dropping the peel and in time each seed on a white napkin spread on the checkered oilcloth. She talked all the while of the mist and the milk cow and this and that, and Roger fixed the biscuits and fried four eggs hard as stones and got the breakfast around her. It was not until he bent over stiffly and slowly to peer into the oven at the browning biscuits, and the hip pocket of his faded Levi’s came into her vision, that Patsy remembered she had been going to cook.
“Oh, dear,” she said, blushing and jumping up. She ran to the cabinet and looked desperately for something to do, but he had even put the plates on the table while she was chattering.
“I’m terrible,” she said. “You have every right to be suspicious of me. I’m completely impractical.”
“Now quit apologizin’ and let’s eat,” he said, sitting down. He wore a clean brown khaki work shirt with the cuffs turned up. The hair on his wrists was as white as the hair on his head, but his wrists were strong-looking, old as he was. He cut through his eggs diagonally. They had been fried in bacon grease and the outsides were brown.
“I guess I’m a shade nervous,” he said. “Haven’t had to cope with a female in this kitchen in the morning for eleven years. That’s how long it’s been since Mary got killed.”
He said the last merely as one states a fact, with no self-pity or nostalgia. Patsy could not understand how he could eat eggs fried so hard.
“How come you fry them that way?” she asked.
“Because it don’t take no talent. You just leave ’em in the frying pan till they’re hard enough to bounce.”
The coffee stopped perking at just that time and Patsy noticed and jumped up before Roger could even scoot back his chair. She poured them cups. The cups were white and thick and had little thin cracks running down their sides. Roger immediately poured half of his coffee into a saucer. His food was already gone. He tilted his chair back, the saucer in one hand, and began to blow on the coffee gently and sip it as it steamed.
“Mary never went barefooted that I can remember,” he said, still more thoughtful than nostalgic.
“Apparently ladies didn’t in earlier days,” Patsy said, contemplating the two brown eggs that seemed to be her responsibility. The peanut butter, the orange, and a sliver of bacon had filled her completely and she was nervous about the eggs. She had heard that in the country food was never wasted.
“Where you and Jim going next?”
“Phoenix.”
“Going in that car?”
“Sure.” She felt suddenly loyal to the Ford. She cut a little corner off one egg to see what the yolk of an egg looked like when it was fried that hard. “It’s our only car. Your pickup is older than it is and you still drive it, don’t you?”
“Well, naturally,” Roger said. “No use buying nothin’ new at my age. I don’t go out tourin’ the world in it, though. Besides, I’m pore. If old Jim’s gonna haul you all over the country he oughta buy you a better automobile than that. He can afford it. You could probably even get a pair of shoes out of him if you sweet-talked him a little.”
Patsy sighed and started to eat the bite of egg and then decided not to eat any egg. She felt too good to stuff herself with things she didn’t want, duty or no duty. Perhaps there were pigs that the eggs could be fed to, though she had not noticed any.
“He doesn’t like being able to afford so much, you see,” she said gravely. Jim’s wealth was one of their
big problems. Her people were new rich, his not so new, and far richer. She did not think it would be polite to talk about the problem of having too much money to a person who had the problem of having too little.
“Just leave them eggs, honey,” Roger said kindly. “I’ve seen strong men who couldn’t choke down my cooking. Why would anyone not like being able to afford things? I’ve wished I was able to afford things all my life.”
“You’re a nice man,” she said smiling, but she felt almost tearful. Small gracious things, like about the eggs, sometimes flooded her with feelings of gratitude. A shadow came under her eyes and the old man saw it. “He doesn’t really know how to do any one thing,” she said. “But he can afford not to, of course. He just hates it. It’s such a silly problem to have when there are so many people, you know, like the poor, who have real problems.”
Uncle Roger looked at her and she saw in his lined, firm face and the twist of his smile that she had touched him, that even though they had only known each other three days he was fond of her, perhaps had just become fond of her as they sat at the breakfast table. Her throat closed and she was choked with feeling and began to scrape with her toenail at the white paint on the thin table legs.
“I’m so emotional,” she said with a quaver.
He chuckled and reached across the napkin full of orange seeds and patted her hand. “Well, what you and him need to do is buy my ranch,” he said. “Then pretty soon you’d be as broke as me and you wouldn’t have no problems like that.”
He stood up, neatly arranged his plate, knife, fork, cup, and saucer, and carried them to the sink. “Wish you’d clean up these dishes for me,” he said. “I’ve got about three days’ work to do today and I better get started.”
He reached into the cabinet, got a toothpick out of a box, and stood looking at her thoughtfully while he picked his teeth.
“Only drawback to that is that you might not be no better at ranchin’ than I am,” he said. “I been at it fifty years and get worse at it ever year. Least that’s the way it looks in the bankbook.”
Patsy looked up in disbelief. “Oh, come on,” she said. “I can’t imagine you not being good at things. You just look like you’d be good at things.”
“Oh, well, that’s just my noble bearing,” he said, smiling and pleased. “You seen yourself how I cooked them eggs. One nice thing about a wife, she keeps a man reminded of how good for nothin’ he is. Mary used to let me know her low opinion of me every morning and I worked like a dog all day hoping I could change it. Never did. She bawled me out the morning she went and had the car wreck.”
He went out to the back porch and got his straw hat and then came back to the door of the kitchen. Patsy sat at the table, her feet drawn up to the top rung of her chair.
“I will wash the dishes,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
“I won’t. Hope you-all can find enough to eat to keep you from starving.”
She was expecting some advice, some country platitude about life and its problems, but Roger just tipped his faded straw hat to her and turned and left.
When she heard the pickup start she got up and did the few dishes, leisurely, not liking the heavy soap but unable to find any detergent. She did like standing at the sink by the open window, smelling the cool morning and the trees and weeds of the north yard. It surprised her that such dry country could have so many nice smells when it was dampened a little.
Once finished, she put the dishes away where she hoped they belonged and, since Roger was not there to be nervous, poked around in the cabinet a bit to see what was there. The knives and forks and most of the utensils were old, so old that most of them had wooden handles, very smooth from many washings and with a faint woody smell of their own. She liked them, they seemed better to the touch than her own stainless and sterling, and it occurred to her that if she and Jim ever did do anthying crazy like buy a ranch she would certainly have all sorts of wood in her kitchen—wooden spoons and wooden bowls and perhaps a huge wooden block for cutting meat on. With a bright woody good-smelling kitchen with a window that looked out on a slope and a deep sky, her cooking might even improve, though probably not. She would stand and look out too long.
She went slowly back up the stairs and got her hand lotion off the bureau and sat again in the chair by the window, rubbing lotion into her hands. Jim was sleeping on his back. She felt a little lonely and would have liked him awake, but probably he would wake up either sulky or sexy and at the moment she felt as cool and unpassionate as if she had become a virgin again. More likely still, he would wake up professional; there were four days’ worth of pictures to be mailed. The next day they were to go to Phoenix, and as Jim was a fanatic marathon driver it would probably be a very long day. She took off her robe, got Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, and lay on the bed on her stomach reading and occasionally tickling her husband’s chest with the ends of her hair, until the warming day made her drowsy and she flopped the book open on the floor by the bed and went to sleep.
5
ELEANOR BREAKFASTED outside in the summertime, on the second-floor patio of her ranch house. She exercised early, on a yellow foam-rubber exercise pad on the patio, and then she showered and put on a slip and a white robe and went back outside, her heavy graying blond hair pulled back and held by an orange headband. The ranch house was a long two-story brown stucco that her mother had built in the twenties, when she was no longer able to abide the creaking three-story frame mansion that had been the Guthrie home for two generations. The patio was on the east side of the house, sunny in the mornings, shady in the afternoons, and was Eleanor’s favorite place on the whole ranch.
She sat at a tiled table at the edge of the patio looking down on the long green lawn that stretched south almost to the barns and corrals. Lucy brought her a grapefruit and some French toast and coffee, and she leafed through a New Yorker as she ate, mostly looking at the ads and the cartoons. Below her the Mexican gardeners were already at work, spading the flower beds and getting ready to water the hedges. To the south, in front of the barns, ten cowhands were saddling up, fiddling with their girths and rope and listening to the foreman outline the day’s work. To the north were her wheatfields, stretching halfway to Red River, and, beyond the barns, to the south and west, the rolling broken country of the ranch spread in a great circle. The ranch house was almost on its rim.
She ate the French toast and would have liked more but didn’t call Lucy. The sun was up, the air bright and still cool. Soon the air would be merely a shimmer of heat and she would be driven inside.
As she ate and turned pages and watched the cowboys mounting she saw a white elongating cloud of dust on the road that led from the highway to the ranch house. The highway was three miles away; the road that led to it ran between the wheatfields and the horse pasture. Long before the hearse swung into the circular driveway below her, Eleanor knew who was coming. Others drove as fast as Sonny, and raised as much dust, but seldom at that hour of the morning; and anyway, she always knew when Sonny was coming. In fifteen years she had learned to tell.
He parked the hearse just beneath her and got out but didn’t look up. In a few minutes she heard the click of his bootheels as he crossed the bedroom floor. All the floors in the house were dark wood, kept bare except for a few Mexican rugs.
She looked up at him just as his hand gave her shoulder a quick hard squeeze. “Why, hello,” she said.
Sonny bent and kissed her lightly and then went around the table. “I’m starved,” he said. His chin was dark with stubble, his black hair tousled and uncombed, and his shirttail out. Though he smiled at her arrogantly, he looked a little bushed.
“Sit down and have breakfast with me,” she said. “We can chat about old times.”
“How you fixed for steaks?”
“I’m sure we have some. Steaks are our reason for existing. Ask Lucy to fix you one.”
“I don’t think I ate yesterday,” he said. “Maybe I’ll ask her to fix me two.”
“Beautiful as ever,” he said. “You dye them streaks in?”
“I’ve never dyed my hair,” she said. “As you well know.” Her eyes were still on The New Yorker.
Sonny stood up, smiled, took the magazine from her, whistled sharply at one of the Mexican gardeners, and cooly sailed The New Yorker over the patio railing. Its pages fluttered as it fell to the ground. The gardener was fat and slow and didn’t catch it, but he picked it up and without waiting for instructions took it into the house to Lucy, who understood all mysteries.
“You can be a bore,” Eleanor said, a little irritated. “I like to read while I eat.”
“If there was another woman like you around I’d marry her,” Sonny said pleasantly. He squished some bourbon around in his mouth as if it were mouthwash. “If I was to get married, then you could sit around out here and read magazines for the rest of your goddamn life.”
“I can, anyway,” Eleanor said. “As a matter of fact that’s what I’ve done most of my life. I love to sit out here and read magazines. I expect to do essentially that until I die.”