“Last night at the Lucky when I asked you to dance, I didn’t have anything in mind, except to dance. You were a cute girl, a bright kid. I thought it would be fun having a few dances. It’d be like high school again, dancing with a nice, innocent girl. All fun and no worry.” He squeezed her shoulder as if to say, Do you see what a fool I am?
“But you weren’t all bubblegummy and giggly. I was talking more than I’ve talked in a long time—about Korea and work and books and whatever the hell. And you listened so … carefully.
“By the time we left the Dakota, I couldn’t wait to get rid of Earl. It didn’t really matter if all we did was talk … or not talk, just ride.”
They passed the box elder grove where they’d parked last night. They were coming to a gas station halfway to Ula. Doyle pulled the car into the drive but not up to the pumps.
“What kind of pop do you like?”
“Root beer,” she told him.
When he returned he was carrying two cold, wet bottles of root beer from the ice case. Climbing in behind the wheel, he said, “My car is my kingdom. A few special guests are allowed—Earl; my little boys, Bret and Roger; and you.”
His little boys, Bret and Roger. The names pierced Bess’s side. How dare she sit where his little boys sat? The dashboard clock said a quarter past four, not late enough for her to tell him, “I have to get home now.”
So she was relieved when he turned the car back in the direction from which they’d come. A short ride and a bottle of pop. Pretty innocent. She breathed country air deep into her lungs and relaxed.
A mile down the road, Doyle swung the car onto a narrow, overgrown lane that you wouldn’t notice unless you looked closely. A sign was nailed to a fence post: ABSOLUTELY NO HUNTING OR TRESPASSING. Hugging a grove of box elders, the car bounced heedlessly over deep ruts. Ahead and to the left lay a clearing where an old farmhouse, gray and withered, stood staring at their approach. A barn had long since fallen to its knees.
Ignoring the house, the Mercury inched along an even narrower path leading away through another grove—like the first, dense with undergrowth.
“Don’t be afraid,” he told her. “There’s a pond out here where my dad and I come duck hunting. I wanted to show it to you. It’s quiet and unspoiled.” He cast a fond eye around him.
“The old man owns the land and it’s posted against trespassers, but I took the lock off the gate when I came back from Korea. It felt like we were running a prison for birds.” He snorted at this romanticism.
As the Mercury crawled through the shrubbery and saplings, their soft green arms reached out for it. Beneath the car, grasses brushed seductively along its belly, making intimate, sighing sounds. After a hundred yards of creeping forward in deep twilight, the car emerged onto a narrow grassy bank before which lay a pond.
A storm of birds flew up. Thick with weeds and abundant reeds, it was not a pond used for swimming, but for the protection of birds so that they might subsequently be killed.
Doyle cut the engine. The density of the afternoon quiet was startling and a little unnerving. They had left the known world and entered a place without a particle of familiarity, a place not found on any map.
“Nobody farms this land?” Bess asked.
He shook his head and snapped the nail of his index finger against a bunch of keys hanging on a ring from the ignition. Among them was a silvery disc with the raised letter D in its center. This he rubbed like a talisman.
“The old man bought the place just for hunting. It’s the only one he doesn’t rent out.” He stared at the pond, eyes narrowed. “The old man’s quite a hunter. Just ducks, but they don’t stand a chance.” He raised an imaginary shotgun to his shoulder, aimed not at the sky but at the pond, and slowly squeezed back the trigger.
“Do you like to hunt?”
“Got enough of that in Korea.”
“But you come here with your dad?”
“Oh, yeah.” He cast her a humorless smile. “It’s important to the old man.”
He leaned back into the corner on his side of the car, resting his left arm on the top of the steering wheel, his right along the back of the seat. He studied Bess while she sat staring straight ahead, out the windshield, at the glowing shore where the lowering sun gilded all the cattails.
At length she turned toward him. “Do you come out here often?”
“You mean by myself?”
She nodded.
“Now and again. Never with a girl.”
He continued to study her, and she turned away, observing, “It’s beautiful and eerie. It must be hard going back to town.”
“Sometimes I imagine that the town has disappeared. That I drive down the road and there’s nothing there. Just fields.”
“How would you feel if it disappeared?”
He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know.” He grinned. “I don’t know how I feel about a lot of things.”
“That’s why you went to Korea.”
“Right. But that didn’t last,” he said, casting his eyes down at the leg that had gotten him discharged from the army. “And I’m all out of Koreas.”
“Where does your dad keep his cattle? The purebreds? They’re not here.”
“South Dakota. Nebraska.”
“Do you know a lot about cattle?”
“I guess someplace in my head I know a lot. The old man’s tried to teach me.” He frowned. “If I had to know it, I’d know it.”
“How do you feel about working for your dad?” She loved asking him personal questions.
“Well, let’s see. I like it better than shooting ducks.” The corners of his mouth tweaked upward, but the smile went no further. “He needs me. I mean, I’m an only child. Who’d take over if something happened to him? My mom couldn’t run the business.”
Suddenly he climbed out of the car and strode away through the grass.
Bess watched, a little stunned, as he moved off tangentially toward a small promontory at the water’s edge. Had she said something wrong?
Chapter 20
HARRIET
Of course you’re going to get married!” Kate snapped. “Bess had no right saying those things.”
“It’s not just that,” Harriet sobbed, shaking her head. She hadn’t shed this many tears since leaving Sioux City. And today was supposed to be a happy day.
“Well, that’s what started it. You were happy as a schoolgirl when you left here with Rose. What Bess said made you start thinking and worrying.”
“If I hadn’t started thinking today, I would’ve started tomorrow or next week.”
Again they were at the dining room table, though it wasn’t yet time for supper. Kate had arrived home from Truska’s to find Harriet making herself a whiskey drink in the kitchen, a thing unheard of except at the holidays. Beer now and then in hot weather. But whiskey on a weekday afternoon?
Harriet had run out of the kitchen when Kate and Frieda came in the back door, Frieda carrying Kate’s box of groceries. Frieda had said, “I’ll talk to you after supper.”
Harriet was sitting at the dining room table, the drink before her, both hands clasped around it, as Kate walked in. Tears flooded an already blotched face, and Harriet grabbed a damp and crushed handkerchief lying beside the whiskey glass, dabbing at her eyes and cheeks. Her upper lip was swollen with crying and her shoulders trembled like a pile of dry leaves.
She couldn’t stop crying. She’d thought that the whiskey would help, but she was having trouble drinking it. Her hands fluttered and wouldn’t obey.
Her thoughts stumbled around, as unmanageable as her hands. If she went crazy, they’d send her to the state hospital in St. Peter. Well, maybe that was the place for her. She could finally stop worrying about everything—about Bess hating her for marrying DeVore; about DeVore’s children hating her for trying to take their mama’s place; about hanging on to a job that men had tried to take away from her (Why should she, they’d asked, an old maid with neither c
hick nor child, have a job that by rights belonged to a family man?). You couldn’t hate someone who was in a state hospital.
“You’ve got to stop this,” Kate was admonishing. “Nerves. That’s all this is.” She fetched a fresh handkerchief from a neat pile she kept in the sideboard next to the napkins. Tossing it across the table, she eased herself down onto a chair. “Wipe your face and stop this. I want to talk to you.”
Harriet plucked up the handkerchief but crossed her arms on the table and buried her face in them, unable to stop sobbing. “Leave me alone.” She’d never answered back to Kate that way, but she couldn’t help herself. All the pain and confusion was making her crazy.
She didn’t want to stay here at the table, going to pieces in front of Kate, but she didn’t have the starch to get up and climb the stairs. She could imagine this unhappy moment expanding itself to fill the rest of her life.
“Maybe I should leave you alone,” Kate said. “I don’t know what good it does me to talk to you. You’ll only believe what you want to.” She frowned and picked up a big ceramic salt shaker, setting it down again, hard, as if it annoyed her. “But I do love you. And you had to earn that love. If you had enough good in you to earn my love, don’t you think you’ve got enough to earn other people’s?”
Kate’s words traveled a great distance to reach Harriet, who was walking away from herself, abandoning the sappy woman sitting folded over the dining room table, the one who’d thrown herself a ludicrous business college graduation party. She was putting distance between herself and all that misery, between herself and that woman’s foolishness.
Kate’s words barely reached her. Something about Bess loving her, about Bess not saying those terrible things unless she loved Harriet.
What did Kate know about not being loved? She’d never been homely as a mud fence. She’d married young, raised a pretty niece and a pretty grandniece, been loved by everyone. What did someone like that know about the absence of love or the awful importance of love? Didn’t it require being loveless to know about love?
“You think everyone but you is strong and sure,” Kate said, her voice sharp, “when really they’re weak as babies and scared and kind of hungry all the time. But they strike a little path and put one foot in front of the other. It’s a risk, but if you keep moving, you find things that need doing, things that you can put to rights. You get courage from moving.” Kate rose and came around the table, laying a hand on Harriet’s shoulder. “But you know that.”
She shook the shoulder until Harriet lifted her head in protest. “Listen to me!” Kate insisted. “It doesn’t matter if you do it for yourself or someone else. But keep moving.
“Hold on to people and let them hold on to you—this galloping Galahad of yours, what do you think he’s doing but holding on to you?”
Kate moved away, grasping the back of a chair for support. With her free hand she covered her eyes as though they were shot through with pain. Harriet turned back from the corner where she’d retreated and stared at Kate’s suffering.
Holding a handkerchief under her nose, she blubbered, “DeVore’s boys don’t want me. They laughed at me. And … and what do I know about being a mother?”
“The only thing you have to know is that those children need you.” Kate lowered herself to the chair she’d been clutching. “They need someone to cook their meals and wash their sheets, someone who knows that they’re scared half to death of forgetting their mother and losing their dad.” Kate flung a folded napkin away from her as if to rid herself of this exhausting scene.
Wearily she said, “You could do that, Harriet, be that someone.”
“But what about Bess?”
Kate sighed. “She probably won’t speak to you. You’re walking out on her. But after a year or two at college, she’ll come around. I’d bet on it. And if she doesn’t, that’s her lookout. But don’t use her as an excuse not to get married. She’d have it on her conscience for the rest of her life.”
Harriet approached the poor heap that was herself and ran her hand over the creature’s hair, smoothing it as she would a child’s. Then she patted the woman’s arm and stood trying to decide whether she loved her enough to put one foot in front of the other.
At length she rejoined herself and blew her nose, though it was not so much for love of herself as for Kate’s sake. What had that been—Kate covering her eyes that way?
“And, my stars, Harriet,” Kate said, her voice spent and reedy, “do you know how happy I’d be to have country people in the family again?” She struggled to her feet. “Now, wash your face.”
In the kitchen Harriet turned on the cold water and splashed her face, soothing her burning eyelids and cheeks. When she was done, she dabbed her face with the hand towel. She would not cry anymore. DeVore was coming tonight to meet Kate. And whatever Harriet decided about him, she didn’t want him to see that she’d been crying.
She really didn’t know what she would decide. So many things were wrong with her marrying him. Why hadn’t she seen that last night? She hadn’t meant to toy with his affections.
She had been flattered to have him ask her. She’d thought it was what she wanted. But she’d been concentrating so hard on his asking that she hadn’t thought about what it would mean. The worst, of course, was losing Bess. Kate could say what she wanted about Bess coming around, but Harriet remembered Mrs. Stubbs. Bess hadn’t come around then.
And the expression on Bess’s face today when she’d heard that Harriet was getting married. That wasn’t something you’d soon forget.
Only minutes before, she had looked at Harriet as if she were someone necessary; they’d been so close, like mother and daughter, Bess feeding Harriet ice cream from her own spoon.
The first time that Bess had looked at her that way—as if she were necessary—was a couple of weeks after Celia and Archer’s deaths. Kate had been down with a migraine (was that what she had today?) when Harriet came home from work, so Harriet had invited Bess out to supper.
They’d walked out to the highway and eaten at the all-night. Then, hiking home afterward, Bess had held on to Harriet’s hand. And when they reached the Drew house and were sitting on the back steps, counting the early stars, seven-year-old Bess had turned to Harriet with much the same expression she’d worn this afternoon, a look of need and trust, and said, “Don’t ever go to the Dakota Ballroom and drink too much, Harriet.”
Chapter 21
KATE
When she heard Bess at the front door, Kate pushed herself up from the kitchen stool.
The girl slipped silently into the hall and would have vanished upstairs, but Kate called out, “I’m ashamed of you.”
Bess leaned heavily against the doorjamb. “What’re you talking about?” she asked, her tone guarded, as if there might be more than one reason for Kate’s shame.
“Harriet.”
“I don’t want to talk about Harriet. Harriet’s dead.” She started to turn away.
“Don’t you dare walk away from me,” Kate told her. “Are you going to kill off everybody who crosses you? I’ll be the next to go.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“I love Harriet.”
“Well, good for you. I don’t.”
“You’re a liar. You don’t get off that easy. Come here and talk about this.”
Bess made no move.
“What can it matter to you if Harriet gets married? You’re leaving for college in two weeks. But Harriet’s got plenty of life ahead of her.”
“Some life—married to a damned dumb farmer.”
“Watch your mouth.” If she were able to move, Kate would shake Bess until her teeth rattled. “I’m a farmer! You don’t know anything about farmers! You’re as ignorant as that Okie father of yours. And you don’t know any more about love than he did.”
“I know this much: if Celia were here, I’d have a lot more of it. Celia knew how to love people.” Bess turned and bolted up the stairs.
Kate fe
lt for the stool just behind her. Half an hour later she was still sitting at the kitchen counter and Celia was standing where Bess had stood.
“What to do?” Kate whispered, shifting on the stool to face Celia. “I forgot the things I meant to say. And what I did say was all wrong.” She trembled with anger that was only now subsiding. “I wasn’t much help to Harriet, either.”
Upstairs Harriet was pushing hangers around in her closet, looking for the right dress. Right for what?
“What’s going to happen when DeVore Weiss shows up?” Kate asked Celia. “Is she going to send him packing—her last chance for His and Hers bath towels and Mexican Surprise casserole and someone …”
Her breast heaved and she cast a glance ceilingward. Both of them, Harriet and Bess, were up there now, a few feet removed from each other, but as far apart as they would ever be.
“And where did Bess go after work?” Kate pressed Celia, knowing she’d get no answer. No matter. Celia listened. The dead listened consumingly.
Bess had looked wary and covert when she came in, probably because she knew Kate would be angry with her. Kate recalled the girl in the dark blue car, the one leaving Harvester when she and Frieda were returning. That girl had reminded Kate of Bess. She’d also reminded her of Celia, the way her body was turned toward the driver, inclined toward him, intent.
If the girl in the car was Bess, where was she going and who was taking her? Bess wouldn’t tell Kate unless she wanted her to know. If she wanted her to know, it was because she had nothing to hide. What would she be hiding?
“My imagination’s running away with me.” It had been one of those deceptive glances. When you saw the car and the passenger again, you realized that there was little resemblance, only a trick of coloring and light. And what was wrong with a girl going for a ride in the country in the afternoon?
Kate lifted her arm, not an easy movement, and massaged the back of her head. Waiting for Bess to escape from Harvester, she’d got wound up as tight as the spring in a windowshade. She was growing dotty waiting.
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