I'll Call Every Monday

by Orrie Hitt

In the distance I could hear a fox running rabbits, barking quick and sharp. All around us the peepers set up a clamor.

  “It’s going to rain,” I said. “My grandfather used to say that it would rain, when you heard the peepers going like that. It usually did.”

  “It always does,” she said. “Sometime.”

  We laughed and held each other close.

  “You love the country, don’t you, Nicky?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I could see it, in your face, when we’ve been up there to the lake.”

  “That’s some of the best of it,” I said, thinking of that deep blue water and the huge pines. “There’s a good life and a small fortune there, Irene.”

  “We’d have to work like hell.”

  “Sure.”

  “Everything we had would go into it.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, leaning back. “We haven’t got it yet.”

  “No.”

  I still had about eleven thousand in the bank and now that I was making some real money in the insurance business I was adding to that every week. I’d never said anything to Irene about it. I’d been keeping that as a sort of surprise.

  She had her head against my shoulder, looking up at me. I could see the soft lines of her lips, the tiny dimple in her chin, her eyes blinking half-closed as they studied me.

  “I don’t want to talk any more,” she said.

  We got out of the car and into the back seat. The excitement mounting inside of me was just as great as that first night when, back in Port Jervis along the Horn Road, another girl and I had started to do the same thing. Only that time when I sat down on the rear cushions of the old Ford I’d found myself very much alone. I’d sat there for a long time, listening to her high-heeled shoes rattle the gravel on the road, wondering if she’d come back for her briefs. She hadn’t.

  “No,” Irene whispered, as I fumbled in my pocket. “Not that, Nicky.”

  “Well, cripes, we’ve got to be careful!” Her lips were hot on my mouth. “Please,” she said. “Not tonight.”

  A couple of rockets went off in my head. I dug my hands into her, meeting her next kiss. I got her dress open in front and her brassiere unfastened. Her breasts pushed out at me, tender and full. The nipples grew hard under the touch of my fingers.

  “Someday they’ll get bigger,” she murmured.

  “How the hell would that be possible?”

  I held her close, hardly breathing.

  “You know when,” she said.

  I could feel her teeth, clean and white, against my tongue, biting down and coming away again. Her hands slid over my shoulders, across my ribs, going lower.

  “Nicky?”

  “Yes.”

  “You won’t hate me, Nicky?” I could only shake my head. “I love you so, Nicky!”

  Everything stood still. The blood left my feet and my legs were numb and aching. I tried to stop those weird sounds that came from my throat, but I couldn’t.

  “Nicky! Nicky!”

  She unbuttoned my shirt.

  “You won’t hate me, Nicky? Please say you won’t!”

  “Christ, no!”

  Her hands started at me again. I could hear her breath coming in short, desperate gasps. “Say it!”

  “I won’t hate you,” I said.

  Maybe Saturday is the best day in the week.

  CHAPTER XV

  MRS. WALTERS WAS ALREADY OUT AT the lake by the time I got there late Sunday morning. She had her kids with her, and the boy had stuck up a pup tent near the pre-war DeSoto Dell had left her. The girl was giving her brother a hand at building a fireplace so that there would be a place to cook lunch.

  “We got up here early,” Mrs. Walters said. “I tried the fishing and had a little luck.”

  There were five large trout lying in some ferns on the shady side of the car. I could see that they had been cleaned.

  “I guess you did, at that.”

  She had on a yellow blouse of some thin material and a pair of worn dungarees that were rolled up to her knees. Her legs were brown and straight and not a blemish on them. A green scarf curled around her head and held her dark hair steady in the gentle breeze.

  “I brought along an axe and a brush-cutter,” she said. “I thought I might do a little work after you’ve gone.”

  “I intended to stay all day.”

  “Well, you don’t have to help me, Mr. Weaver. I’m not going to do very much.”

  We walked down toward the lake, leaving the kids to argue it out as to which side of the fireplace the chimney should be placed, or if a chimney was actually required.

  “You said you had some man coming out this morning. Did I miss him?”

  She glanced at her watch.

  “He ought to be here pretty soon. He said it’d be around twelve.”

  We heard the kids shout as an army-surplus jeep bounced up the road and halted beside her car. “That must be him now.”

  The man who came striding down the slope was a big man, not fat, but with tremendous shoulders and hips as big as a side of beef. There was a couple of days’ growth of beard on his face. Just before he got to us he tossed a cud of tobacco into the bushes.

  “Mr. Weaver,” she said. “Mr. Carter.”

  He had a hand like a vise.

  “God!” he said, staring up at the pines. “How I’d like to get my saw into those babies!”

  Mrs. Weaver looked at me and let her breath out. I could see that she wanted me to do the talking.

  “We don’t want to cut very much right around the lake.”

  “That’s smart,” he said. “You’d lower the water level by doing that.”

  “Just enough to clear out what space we need.”

  “You got it staked out?”

  “No.”

  He scratched his head.

  “So what kind of a deal can I make out of that?” he wanted to know.

  I grinned back at him.

  “There’s a lot of pine on this property,” I said. “Some of it’s old and it ought to be cut before it gets shaky on the stump.”

  “You’ve been around, Mr. Weaver. Some of those butt logs won’t be as good as they look. And you lose the butt log and you haven’t got much tree left.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling Mrs. Walters.” I pointed over to the end of the lake. “The land extends about two miles beyond that, and almost as much from either side. I haven’t been up there, but it looks like there’s plenty of pine.”

  “There is.” Carter winked at Mrs. Walters. “I’ve trapped and hunted every foot of that ground.”

  “Dell never minded,” she said. “A lot of people come in here.”

  “That pine ought to be thinned out,” I told him. “Cut the biggest and leave anything under ten inches on the stump. That’s after you get two hundred yards from the water. We don’t want anything cut along the shore. Like you said, it wouldn’t do the lake any good and it’d spoil the scenery.”

  “I’ll look it over,” he said.

  “When?”

  “Why not today?”

  “That would be fine. We’d also want the tops and the brush burned.”

  “That wouldn’t be hard,” he said. “If the cutting is done in the winter. Pine is hell to cut in the summer, anyway. Pitch all over the place.”

  “We’re just thinking about it,” I said. “There’s nothing definite yet.”

  “I understand that, Mr. Weaver.”

  “As long as you do.”

  After that we stood around for a while, talking about how long it took pine to dry out good without being kiln-dried, how much it might cost to drill a well and what we could do with the dirt that would be excavated for the foundations. Carter had a good general idea of country construction and I had a feeling that he would be a tremendous help to us. I told Mrs. Walters that as he disappeared from view, his huge shoulders swinging through the shade of the pines.

  “He’s q
uite a friend of my mother,” she said. “She told me I ought to talk to him.”

  “Your mother must be a big help to you,” I said. “She is.”

  “I didn’t know that she lived with you.”

  “She doesn’t.” She started walking back toward the car and I followed her. “When my father died he left her a four-family apartment building. She lives in one and rents out the other three. We get along better that way.”

  “I guess no house is big enough for two families,” I said.

  She stopped by the car and regarded the boy and the girl, her eyes soft.

  “Not when I have them,” she said.

  She had a book of plans in the car and we got that out and went over to a shady spot and sat down. The day was growing hotter and even the earth burned through to my skin.

  “Here’s one,” she said, opening the book. “It’s too small, of course, the way it is, for a clubhouse. But it’s got good lines and we could add to it.”

  The picture was of a ranch-style affair, not too low and not too high. It had big windows and a sweeping porch. I liked her choice and told her so.

  “That would fit good up on the bluff,” I said. “It wouldn’t stick up in the air too much, and it’d crown the top of the hill just right. From there you can see the whole lake, like a picture in a frame.”

  Irene and I had picked out the spot, and we’d speculated as to how the guests could sit out there on the porch, relaxed, just watching the beauty of the scene below.

  “Uh-uh,” Mrs. Walter said, laughing. “That’s my hill, Mr. Weaver.”

  I caught her gay mood.

  “Sold to the girl in the half-pants,” I said.

  I thought I could see the color flame in her cheeks for a moment. She looked down and saw that her dungarees had pulled up way over her knees. She didn’t do anything about it.

  “Well, maybe only half that bluff, Mr. Weaver. But I’ve simply got to have part of it for my dream house.”

  For just an instant I felt very badly about the whole thing.

  “It’s all a dream,” I said. “Every bit of it.”

  “Not my house, Mr. Weaver.”

  “No?”

  Her brown eyes sought out the high rise of ground, lingered there.

  “I’ve made up my mind, Mr. Weaver. I’m going to sell my place in town and I’m going to build up there. A place just like the one in this picture. Even if I never have any more than that, I’m going to have that much.”

  “That’ll be a lot.”

  She rolled over and lay there in the grass, still looking up at the bluff, her elbows at an angle on the ground and her chin in her hands.

  “There’s three bedrooms in the plan and I’d only need two for us. I can put Janey’s bed in my room and let Dick have one to himself. That would leave me one vacant. And I can rent that in the summer to someone. I know I can. That way, I can find out how people will like it here.”

  “They’ll like it. Don’t worry about that.”

  “Later, I can add some more rooms to it, building gradually. I can manage that if I’m careful. I’m sure I can.”

  “You’re going at it the right way,” I said. She smiled at me.

  “If you came in with me, Mr. Weaver, that would change the picture. But I’m not counting on that. You told me not to. And sometimes, when I realize how forward I was, I think that it wasn’t fair for me to approach you at the time I did.”

  I looked away from her, my gaze sweeping across the lake to the shore beyond.

  “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” I said, truthfully. She sat up straight.

  “You’ve helped me, too,” she said. “I was desperate when Dell — did that. I guess the reason for doing it was harder to accept than the act itself. I kept asking myself what I had done that had failed him. And I got no answer, Mr. Weaver. There is no answer. People are people and some of them just fly apart.”

  Although Dell had not been dead very long, I did not feel that what she said was in any way meant to be disrespectful. I saw it as a courage — a deep, shining courage that would reach out and grasp her children, holding them safely.

  “Mrs. Walters,” I said, “you are a remarkable woman.”

  This time there was no mistake about the color in her face.

  “I wonder if you’ll say the same after I’ve fried the trout,” she said, and stood up quickly. “And there’s only one way to find out.”

  By this time the girl had switched over to a coloring book, so I got down beside the boy and helped him complete the fireplace. Then we got some charcoal out of the trunk of the car and started the fire. We had quite a bull session while were were doing that. He was eleven and he said he liked school, fishing, and he wanted to be a forest ranger. I told him he was on the right track.

  Mrs. Walters put some salt and pepper on the trout while the big iron skillet heated over the coals, rolled them in flour and placed them in the buttered pan. By the time they were done the smell of them had almost driven me out of my mind. And they turned out to be just as good as they smelled.

  “I’ll wash the dishes,” I said, as we finished.

  “No,” Mrs. Walters said. “The children like to do that. Why don’t you lie down and take a little nap?” I grinned.

  “There must be something I can do.”

  “Well, I was going to do some work up on the bluff,” she said. “Not much. Just enough to get started. If you want, there’s fish poles in the car and you can try the lake.”

  “I’ll help you,” I said.

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “It’ll do me good.” There was a brush-hook and an axe in the back seat of the car. I got those out and carried them up to the top of the bluff.

  “How do we figure who’s going to do what?” I asked her. “Draw straws?”

  She laughed and took the brush-hook.

  “I’m not so hot with an axe,” she said. “But I can manage to cut these sweetfern bushes with the hook. There aren’t too many.”

  I stripped down to my waist, letting the sun get at me, and set to work on an old chestnut stump. The outside of the wood was wet and rotten and sheered off quickly, but the inside was hard and the axe rang dull against the brown heart. I felt the sun burning hotter as the sweat ran down from my shoulders, soaking the top of my pants.

  I watched her as she worked. Her arms were strong and brown and she handled the hook like she knew what she was doing. She’d start on a bunch of sweetfern so that she was always bringing the swath out, leaving it clear for the next sweep. She worked with a slow rhythm that made her look cool even there in the hot sun. Once or twice she bent over to pull an old piece of wire out of the way. When she did that her blouse sagged in front. There was no doubt about her being all woman.

  “Had enough?” she wanted to know, after a couple of hours.

  “You ought to take a break,” I told her. I felt good and the axe was getting lighter in my hands. “I’ll finish off this stump.”

  “I thought we might take a swim,” she said. “Make us feel better.”

  “I guess I have trunks,” I said.

  She started down the slope, the handle of the hook held in the crook of her arm.

  “See you at the lake, Mr. Weaver.”

  “Okay.”

  I cut a couple of more roots loose, got hold of the stump and rolled it over. The damp smell of the earth and rocks came up at me. I pushed the stump over to the pile I had made and left it there. Some rainy day they could be burned.

  I went down toward the car, the breeze feeling good against my hot skin. She was already down there in the water, standing waist-deep while she fixed the red cap over her head. The boy and the girl were also down there in suits, and they were splashing with handfuls of water, and laughing.

  The trunks were in the back of the Buick, although she had left an extra pair hanging on one of the doors of her car. I supposed they had been Dell’s.

  I was out of view of the lake, so I sl
ipped out of my clothes and put the trunks on. My legs were covered with streaks of dirt from where the powdery gray stuff had come up and clung to the sweat. I left my shoes on and went down to the lake.

  They were swimming in a small cove which hadn’t been so noticeable from the hill above. The bottom was sandy and along the shore the water was shallow. The boy had his sister in a couple of feet of water, holding her up and trying to show her how to do the breast stroke. Mrs. Walters was on the other side of the cove, sitting on some rocks in the sun, her arms and legs glistening as though they had been oiled.

  “Gee!” I heard the boy say. “Look at his shoulders!”

  I kicked off my shoes and tore up a spray as I ran out and knifed my body into the water. There was a clear green look to it and it felt good. I swam over there to where she was sitting on the rocks and pulled myself up beside her.

  “Better?” she wanted to know.

  “Yes.”

  “Want a cigarette?”

  “I’m not going to walk back to the car for them.” She took off her cap and handed me a pack of Camels and some matches.

  “I don’t do any diving,” she said. “So I can carry them up here.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I lit one, folded the cover together on the matches and handed them back to her. “Would you?”

  “I thought you didn’t smoke.”

  “Once in a while,” she said. “Three or four a day.”

  We sat there for a while in the sun, watching the kids horse around. Off up the lake a fish hawk circled high, dropped lower, cutting the circle smaller. Suddenly the hawk hovered, folded his wings and plunged down. A white dot appeared on the calm surface as the bird hit, followed almost immediately by another one as he came out lugging his prey, slowly gaining altitude.

  “Now, if we could fish like that,” she said.

  We laughed.

  “Oh, it’s good to be here!” she said, taking a deep breath. Her breasts pushed out against her blue suit, high and pointed. “You can say that again,” I said.

  Her face became serious as she looked back at the children.

  “I’m so lucky,” she said. “Here I am, not yet thirty, and he’s eleven. It won’t be long before he’s out of high school, and a man.”

  “You were married young,” I said.