“Won’t be the first time.” He squeezed Bess’s thigh. “Lotta times I can’t sleep, I run away. Out here. Not as dramatic as Korea, but handy.” A bruised expression came over him, and he held tight to Bess’s leg, unaware that his fingers were digging into her flesh. “Just stay a minute.”
She did not care about the small pain to her thigh. “I have to go,” she said. She had to get home before daylight.
Running a hand down her cheek and along her jaw, he traced her lips with his fingertips.
She snatched them between her teeth, biting down until she knew that she was hurting him.
“I’ll walk you to the road,” he told her.
They stumbled along the lane, where foxtail and thistle cleaved to them as they passed. Each with an arm around the other, they held fast, she to his waist, he to her shoulder, squeezing too hard, claiming and punishing each other.
At the road they clung for a moment, then thrust each other away without a word. Words were containers for small and tidy feelings.
Bess ran.
Gathering a black scum of mascara and road dust, tears channeled down her face unnoticed and uninterrupted.
She could not run for long. After hurtling headlong for a mile, turning her ankles again and again on the coarse gravel, her heels were bleeding where the shoes raised blisters and then punctured them. She stopped on the grassy verge between the road and the ditch and stepped out of the flats. Unhooking her garter belt, she skinned that off, along with the nylons, stuffing them into the shoes. Then, snatching up her clutch bag in one hand and the shoes in the other, she ran.
How long before the sky would pale?
Because the road would cut her feet to pieces, she was running on the grass now. But even the grass was full of gravel thrown up by cars. Again and again she cried out and hobbled.
Winded, she slowed, gulping air and kneading her side where a sharp stitch pinched. In the deep grass of the ditch bottom and along the fencing, things moved. When she slowed, she could hear them. Thinking about them was less distressing than thinking about Doyle Hanlon, so she considered the hidden, scurrying animals. Rabbits, gophers, raccoons. Maybe a fox. Snakes probably.
Far ahead, separating themselves from the dim string of lights that were Harvester, two brighter lights blossomed. A car. God, she couldn’t let the driver see her.
Throwing herself down into the ditch, she waited, praying that the deep grass and the green sheath dress would conceal her. She damned the time it took the car to approach, precious minutes when she should be running.
With the car well past, Bess emerged, dashing ahead, trying to gain lost time. She was approaching the Geigers’ farm, where yard lights burned and a dog barked, a large dog by the sound of it.
As a driveway opened up between dark flanking trees, the dog came plunging down the lane, barking and growling. A huge black creature, he bounded into the road at Bess’s heels, snapping and snarling.
She could run no faster. Her chest ached and the vein in her temple wanted to explode. Again and again the dog lunged at her heels, each time a little closer, working up the will to sink his teeth into her fleshy calf. She felt his slobber on her skin.
Across the road, on the right and ahead of Bess, lay a small grove not attached to a farmhouse. From these trees rose a howling that broke off abruptly into barking. As Bess and the black dog drew near, another dog appeared, behind the far fence, crawling beneath it to emerge at the top of a little incline. He hesitated, then flew down into the ditch and up to the road’s edge.
The new dog ran along the opposite verge, foraying now and then onto the road, snarling. Not all dogs in the country belonged to someone.
Dogs who’d been abandoned and turned feral roamed across farms, killing small animals and scavenging.
The lights of town were brighter, closer, maybe two miles distant, but Bess could not go on running. Soon she would have to stop. The cramp in her side was screwing itself deeper into her belly so that she ran hunched to that side.
As the second dog charged out farther onto the road, the Geiger dog responded, gnarling and snapping at him, veering out from behind Bess to drive the other dog back, yet never abandoning his pursuit of her.
Sweat poured from Bess’s scalp, down her back and down her brow into her eyes. At first she thought that the two lights expanding on the horizon were no more than salt stinging her eyes, but they flared up into headlights. Once more she threw herself into the ditch.
Now the dogs would be on her. When they saw that they’d run her to earth, they would leap on her. Could two dogs, one of them wild, kill a person?
Celia, help me. Fly out of the moon.
She hooded her head with her arms and lay gasping, throat on fire. The car was coming fast. Someone drunk, speeding home.
And then it was passing, tossing up dust and hurling gravel, roaring ahead, driving the darkness back. The dogs pursued its exhaust, leaping to snatch its heels, falling back and leaping again, finally falling off, still barking and contending far down the road, where their voices waned.
Bess did not move. She listened. Close at hand crickets screaked, admonishing her to go home where she belonged; mourning doves, disturbed in their rest, murmured deep in their throats, unarticulated and motherly advice.
When she had regained her breath, Bess dragged herself up and set out limping, first at a walk and then a trot and then again a walk. At the outskirts of Harvester, town dogs set up a tune, but these were behind fences or tied up. Bess trotted raggedly along Pine Street, turning at last down Third Avenue. A slatey horizon silhouetted the trees on the east side of town. How many people, behind curtains, observed her passing, purse and shoes in hand?
At Second Street she crossed diagonally to the left toward Aunt Kate’s house. Except for the light cast by the streetlamp, the house lay in predawn darkness. Maybe Kate was still asleep.
Letting herself in, Bess tiptoed along those floorboards that she knew didn’t squeak. Straight ahead through the foyer she crept, and then into the dining room to lay her bag on the table so that Kate, when she came down, would know that Bess was home.
Gliding down the upstairs hallway, she heard Harriet’s soft snoring. Outside her own door, Bess glanced toward her aunt’s, where thin, lace-filtered light from the streetlamp reached across the room and through the open door. But Kate’s bed was lost in the darkness.
With the soiled green sheath flung down in the closet, bloodied flats beneath it, Bess pulled on a cotton gown and shivered despite the heat. Sliding into bed, she drew the sheet over her and lay cold and still as stone.
Slogging home had required all her strength and attention. But now she must pick over the past several hours, gingerly, like someone tending a wound.
She saw that the car trouble had closed off some gap in a wall through which Doyle Hanlon had hoped to squeeze, however briefly. Possibility had drained out of him as he sat cursing his luck. Not merely the possibility of their making love—maybe that was the least of it—but some other possibility that she could not define.
Her head throbbed.
Climbing out of bed and padding to the bathroom, she swallowed three aspirin and let the cool water run in a trickle while she wet a flannel cloth. Lifting it to her face, she saw in the mirror the ravages of the night’s tears. With care she bathed the swollen eyes, the puffy cheeks and tumid mouth.
Doyle Hanlon isn’t done with wishing, but he is done with daring.
I would have dared.
Chapter 25
HARRIET AND BESS
Bess, wake up.” Harriet sat on the edge of Bess’s bed, shaking the girl’s shoulder.
Bess turned over, picked sleep from her eyes, and glanced at the clock. Six-thirty. “I’ve got fifteen minutes yet. I don’t go to work till seven-thirty.” She peered at Harriet, who was still in her robe. “What’re you crying about? If it’s—”
“I called Dora at home and told her you wouldn’t be in.” Harriet pulled a Kleenex from
the box beside the bed and blew her nose. She’d meant not to cry. For Bess’s sake she’d meant to be as solid as bricks.
Alarmed, Bess sat up. “What’s wrong?”
“I have bad news, little girl.” She reached for Bess’s hand and patted it. She was sinking under a wave of loss and bewilderment, and she held Bess’s hand as much to keep from going under as to comfort.
“What is it?”
Harriet sucked a deep, shuddering breath and squared her shoulders. “Kate’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“She died during the night.”
“You’re lying.”
Harriet shook her head and put her arms around Bess, her throat so tightly closed off that she couldn’t speak.
“I don’t believe you,” Bess said, shrugging the woman off.
“I found her when I went downstairs. I’ve called Gus and Archie Voss.” The constable and the mortician. “And Dr. White and Frieda.” Had she forgotten anyone?
“I’m still dreaming,” Bess cried, throwing back the sheet and pushing Harriet aside. “Aunt Kate!” she shrieked, running to Kate’s room. Faced with an empty bed, she wheeled, racing into the hall and down the stairs. “Aunt Kate!”
Harriet followed, dabbing her eyes dry with the tissue and cinching her robe.
Kate was sitting on the living room sofa, head thrown back, arms flung out to either side, one resting on the sofa arm, the other on a seat cushion, as if—as if what? As if she had been thrown there with great force, Harriet thought.
Bess knelt and reached out tentative hands to lay them on Kate’s knees. “Aunt Kate.” She stroked the cool, lifeless hand lying on the sofa.
Harriet stood in the doorway. “I closed her eyes.”
“Oh, God,” Bess moaned and lay her head on Kate’s knees.
Steps sounded on the front porch. Frieda and Arnold. Stripped of all her starch and looking as if her rough, sturdy knees might give way, Frieda came first, still in hair curlers and carrying a cake pan.
“I had this coffee cake …” she said, holding out the pan, as if offering it to a lifeless Kate.
When Harriet had taken the cake from her, Frieda stood, her thick, reddened fingers held prayerfully at her waist, as if she were at the Communion railing. “I told her I’d call her after supper. But we went to The Quiet Man.”
Harriet said, “I’ll put this in the kitchen and start some coffee.” She hesitated. Was Frieda all right? Should she fetch the ammonia?
“Sit down, Frieda,” Arnold told his wife, guiding her to a chair.
Frieda obeyed, though her gaze remained fastened on Kate. She shook her head as if Kate’s pose puzzled her. Aloud but to herself she said, “She doesn’t look frightened, does she?”
Bess still knelt at Kate’s feet, clinging to her aunt’s knees.
Carrying the coffee cake to the kitchen, Harriet filled the electric percolator, adding a few grains of salt to the coffee as Kate always did to bring out the flavor. When she’d plugged in the perc, she sat down on Kate’s stool.
She was no Kate, but she would be the best Harriet she could be. She had to consider that wild and willful little girl in the living room.
However much she came to love DeVore’s children, they would never mean to her what Bess did. Wasn’t it strange, maybe even wrong, how a person loved the unlovable one fiercest of all?
Someone knocked softly at the screen door, and Arnold went. “Gus.”
Within minutes the doctor and the mortician followed the constable into the house, bringing with them the stamp of certitude. Indeed, Kate Drew was dead. Harriet drew Bess away from the body so that Archie Voss and Gus Wall could lift Kate onto a gurney, cover her with a sheet, and wheel her out to the waiting hearse.
Still in her nightgown, Bess followed, out the front door, down the steps and the sidewalk to the street. Harriet pulled her back before she could climb into the hearse.
“She shouldn’t be alone,” Bess cried.
Holding the girl, Harriet stroked her long, disordered hair. What she means is she shouldn’t be alone. Harriet was pleased with herself for recognizing this. It was the sort of thing that Kate would have seen.
When the hearse had disappeared, Harriet led Bess inside, telling her, “Why don’t you have a bath while I make breakfast for Frieda and Arnold? Frieda looks like the frayed end of a rope.”
Later, when she had bathed and dressed, Harriet sat down at Kate’s desk to draw up a list. If you didn’t know what to do, if you were half crazy, the best thing to do was draw up a list. Taking up a pen, she wrote, “People to Call.” DeVore. The new Methodist minister, Reverend Hinks. Well, new a year ago. Dry as dust, but the best that they had.
Then she must call the nursery about floral sprays. And what about the Ladies’ Aid Circle? They’d need to know. They’d be helping with the reception after the service. Come to think of it, she had to notify a lot of people. Mr. Hardesty at the Standard Ledger. Oh, no, he was on vacation. That new young reporter, then. And so on and so on. Good thing she had a head for detail.
Harriet knew better than to trust this composure. She was running on disbelief. But that was all right, a sight better than collapsing and crawling into bed, which was what she wanted to do.
Her several lists completed, she climbed the stairs. From Kate’s closet she withdrew a couple of dresses, laying them across the unmade bed.
“Bess,” she called, “could you come here?”
Bess appeared, looking sightless. Though she wasn’t crying, her face was puffy and flushed as if stung all over by bees.
“Which of these dresses do you think I should take to Voss’s?”
“The dark red was her favorite.”
Returning the blue dress to the closet, Harriet said, “You might want to come to Voss’s with me.”
“What’re you going to do?”
“Well, the most important thing is to pick out a casket.” Harriet swallowed hard.
For Bess the content of Harriet’s words lagged far behind the sound. “Yes. All right,” she said after several moments.
Before they left Voss’s but after they’d concluded their business, Archie Voss brought out the gown and seersucker robe Kate had been wearing, handing them to Harriet.
“Would you like these?” Harriet asked Bess.
Bess took them, observing that her note to Kate was sticking partway out of the robe pocket. Aunt Kate—In case you get up in the night … Someday she would be glad that Kate had read her note. But now, nothing mattered except that Kate was dead. In the night without farewell or trumpets.
Bess was disconnected, untethered. That Kate had been her tether all these years only now occurred to her. She must hang on to things if she was not to float away entirely. In her room she picked up books from the floor and from the bed and held them for ballast. Returning them to the shelf, she held on to the bookcase as if to a mooring.
When she had returned all of the books, she gathered up the many items of clothing lying scattered, clasping them to her as though their mass and history lent them weight. Laying them in the laundry basket, she stood beside the closet door, clutching the basket in her arms.
At length she set the laundry down beside the door and pulled the sheets and pillow slips from the bed, dumping them in with the soiled clothes.
Climbing onto the bed, she clung to it for half an hour.
In Kate’s room later, she saw the unmade bed, hardly rumpled because Kate was unable to fling herself about. Had been unable to fling herself about. Lifting Kate’s pillow, Bess held it against her face, breathing in the scent of Pond’s cold cream and Lady Esther dusting powder.
“Would you like to sleep in here now?” Harriet asked from the doorway.
Eventually the question reached Bess. Without turning, she said, “Yes.”
“Should I change the linens? I’m doing some wash.”
“No. Thank you.”
Still holding the pillow, Bess sat down on Kate’s little bedroom ro
cker, the one in which Kate had rocked Celia when Celia was small, singing lullabys to her and reciting nursery rhymes. Bess knew this because Celia had told her and because Kate had done the same for Bess when she was small.
“The Queen of Hearts
She made some tarts,
All on a summer’s day.
The Knave of Hearts
He stole the tarts,
And took them clean away.
“The King of Hearts
Called for the tarts,
And beat the Knave full sore;
The Knave of Hearts
Brought back the tarts,
And vowed he’d steal no more.”
Throughout the day neighbors brought food. The funeral was set for Monday, a long way off, but no one wanted it on Sunday. Harriet hoped the casseroles and cakes would keep until the wake Sunday night. She’d carried several dishes over to Marie Wall’s to store in her refrigerator and several to Frieda’s.
Between phone calls and visits, Harriet tried to keep an eye on Bess. At noon she called her down for a little lunch. Bess came willingly enough, but she only drank iced tea and ate a bit of watermelon, not enough to keep her strength up.
Later, Harriet rang Mrs. Olson, who had already heard about Kate from Marie Wall. Maybe Donna could talk to Bess, Harriet thought. Maybe she could find out if Bess was, well, all right. But Donna was baby-sitting. She had a job for the summer, baby-sitting part-time while the mother filled in at the Friendship Arms Nursing Home. Harriet had forgotten.
With the wash hung out on the line, Harriet donned an apron, tied a scarf around her head, then fetched the Hoover, dust mop, and rags from the closet in the kitchen. In the living room she gathered up the pile of Country Gentlemans, wondering where to put them. “Well, of course,” she said aloud and carried them up to her room, stacking them on top of the Better Homes and Gardens.
Cleaning house felt sacrilegious to Harriet, but, like washing clothes, it answered the need to be doing something.
After supper Donna showed up. In the living room on the sofa, in the very spot where Kate had died, Bess heard Harriet tell her, “She’s in there. Go ahead in.”
What a Woman Must Do Page 17
