"Maybe for you, but what do you think you'd feel if this was my family you were going to meet?" she persisted.
"I've already had the honor, and I was shaking in my shoes. But this is my family. They're different. Now come on."
She let him tug her out of the car, then over to where Willie sat, watching without a word.
A woman and two little boys were thumping watermelons. Shiloh didn't know any of them.
"So you finally decided to come home," Willie drawled, without waiting for his grandson to speak. "Your mama's been worried."
"I'm sorry. I figured you'd hear what happened. And I told her from the beginning I'd be all right."
"We've heard a lot. And it appears to me that there's a whole bunch of things you didn't tell us." Willie pushed himself up on his cane, looking at the girl whose hand Billy held tightly in his—the girl who stood so close to his grandson. "So this is Pennington's daughter, is she?"
Billy's hand tightened around Shiloh's. "This is my wife," he said pointedly. "Her name is Shiloh."
"Hmphm." Willie squinted at her. "Pretty as a picture, just like Clancy said. I hope she's pretty enough to be worth all the trouble."
"I hope I'm worth her," Billy returned.
Willie looked from her to him, then back to Shiloh. "Why'd you marry him, girl?"
Shiloh answered steadily, "Because I love him."
"How much is this corn, Willie?" the woman called across the fruit stand.
"Price is marked on each bushel basket, Melinda. You just got to look for it."
"Mama, I don't know how else to tell you, so I'll just come out and say it. This is Shiloh. We got married a few weeks ago."
Billy held her in front of him, his hands on her upper arms, her back pressed tightly to his chest. He wanted Ellen to take to Shiloh, to understand that she was different from all the other girls, and not just because she was his wife. But his mother's face was a little frightened, a little shy, a little angry—probably at him.
"It's nice to meet you," Shiloh said hesitantly, her own hands reaching up to curl around his, as if for reassurance.
Her politeness flustered Ellen even more. She nodded at Shiloh and mumbled, "Nice to meet you," her hands twisting the apron she wore.
Billy's mother was a pretty woman, Shiloh thought, shorter and more petite than she herself was, blond and green-eyed. There was little about her even to suggest that she had mothered him.
Certainly none of his laughter. She looked stern and stiff.
They don't like me, she thought in dismay.
"You never gave a sign you were thinkin' about gettin' married," his mother told him quietly. "I got the news long about dark yesterday. The last to know. Ann McIntyre, the biggest gossip in Seven Knobs, she told me on her way home from Sweetwater. I kept waitin' for you to come and tell me. Waited 'til eleven last night before I went to bed."
"I'm sorry, Mama. But we had a pretty rough day yesterday. I wanted to get away" Billy's face darkened as he faced Ellen over Shiloh s head.
"I need to talk to you, Will," she returned, glancing away from the girl in her son's arms.
"That's fair. But I want to show Shiloh the house, okay? We're married, Mama. Really and truly married. We want to live here, unless there's a reason you've got against us doin' that."
His voice challenged Ellen, and Shiloh turned her face toward his chest. This involvement in the personal, intimate relationships of a family that she didn't belong to was intensely embarrassing.
Ellen moved at last, answering flatly. "The house is more yours than anybody's. I'm not disputin' the facts, Billy. You've put ever' red cent in it that's been put in for the last five years. You can do as you please in it."
"It's part mine, that's all." He moved suddenly, pulling away from Shiloh to drop a kiss on his mother's cheek. She caught at his arm convulsively for a second, then released him back to Shiloh.
"Reckon I'll go down to the fruit stand for a while," she said huskily. "I'll be there when you're ready to talk." She looked directly at Shiloh.
Maybe it was hurt, or doubt, or fear, or even reserve that made her seem withdrawn and her green eyes sad, Shiloh thought as Ellen spoke. "We're real glad to have YOU in the family, Miss Penn—"
"Shiloh." She smiled tentatively at her mother-in-law, wondering if there would ever be a meeting ground for the two of them.
"Walker," Billy added insistently. "Her name is Walker, Mama."
He had never realized before just how old and even downright shabby the interior of the farmhouse was. The outside of it he had kept painted, just as he kept the lawn mowed and the shrubs and the hedges trimmed.
But it had been years since much time had been put into the house. All three of them had worked frantically on the expanding orchards and on the business.
There was never enough money to stretch to buy new carpets or curtains, and even if there had been, Ellen had always been an outdoors, practical person, not a woman who liked or understood any more about a house than keeping it squeaky clean.
It never mattered to her if the bedroom suites matched, or if the two worn-out recliners in the living room were gray and the carpet a dusty tan.
Or that three different kinds of chairs sat around the heavy oak table in the kitchen.
But Billy saw it now with new eyes and winced, remembering the luxury of the rooms he'd seen at Shiloh's house. But he showed her everything stubbornly—better that she understood things right up front.
The house looked like an L from the front, with long banistered porches filling in from one gable to the end of the house, both upstairs and downstairs, both front and back.
But in truth, it formed a T. An arm projected backward from the kitchen, as well as forward from it.
The room to the front was an old-fashioned, little-used parlor; the room to the back of the kitchen was a complete surprise, a light, buttery room full of the morning sun. Windows on one side let it flood in; windows along the back revealed a giant hickory tree casting a heavy shadow outside; and a door on the third wall opened onto the back porch.
The room held an old white iron bed with a patchwork quilt, a wooden set of drawers painted blue, and a straight back chair with a cane bottom, painted a horrible brown. There was no carpet, just a squeaky, yellowy, waxed wooden floor.
"Whose room is this?" Shiloh asked, breaking the silence that lay around them as he opened doors and motioned her into rooms.
"Nobody's. I think it was once Grandpa's sister's. The place has been in his family for years." Billy moved away, motioning her after him. "Down this hall is the bathroom. There's only one. Here's the den, and down there"—he pointed to a door at the end of the hall—"that's Grandpa's room."
"Where does your mother sleep?"
"Upstairs . . . here." Billy motioned her to the long narrow stairs that led up between two wall-papered walls. Nothing glamorous about these steps, Shiloh thought, remembering the gentle curve and the deliberately exposed, arched support beams of the stairs in her own home. Sam's home. Billy Bob's steps were just to connect one floor to another, that was all.
"Mama's in this room." He showed her the open door at the top right of the steps, but she hung back, reluctant to look in. "She's right above Grandpa. He can't get up and down stairs anymore, but if he needs her, he just taps on the ceiling with his cane."
That only left one important place to visit.
"This is my room," he said quietly, and stood aside to let her enter. It was beside his mother's room. Too close.
A big bed made of red oak stood in the dead center, its headboard against one wall. A table beside it, a lamp, an alarm clock. One tall dresser with a small mirror above it, shelves on one entire wall that ran from the ceiling down to a long desk.
And books.
They surprised her. She glanced at them, then at him as he watched her face.
He didn't seem like a reader.
She moved to the shelves, reached up, and pulled one off. Introduction to Anim
al Husbandry. Another one above that was entitled Advanced Studies in Horticulture.
"Have you read all these?" she asked in amazement, putting down the heavy tome she'd picked up.
He shrugged, his cheeks a little flushed. "Most of 'em. Not because I wanted to. Because I had to, so I could understand things that I needed to know."
"I . . . see."
That was a lie. She didn't see anything. How could she? Her eyesight was blurred from tears.
What had she done? She had taken as a husband a man she had only known briefly four years ago. She didn't know him now, not the first thing about the way he lived, not how he thought, not even what he read.
This was an unknown house that didn't feel or smell like home.
Nobody wanted her here except Billy Bob, and he himself had done things to her that had made her a stranger even to herself.
For one painful minute, Shiloh wanted to go home to Laura and Sam, until she fought down the wave of homesickness.
"What's the matter?" Billy asked tenderly, coming up behind her to wrap his arms around her, to cuddle her up against him, his chin on top of her head. "Afraid I'm gonna make you read all of these books? Well, don't worry. They'd put a hyperactive to sleep, and I want you wide awake, baby."
His teasing didn't offer much reassurance, but enough for her to say what she wanted.
"The room at the end of the porch downstairs, Billy. Could I—can I have that one?"
He went still behind her, the hands that had been stroking her arms freezing.
"You mean—to sleep there?"
She nodded.
"And just tell me," he said dangerously, pushing away from her, twisting her around to face him, "why you can't sleep here, in my room, with me?"
"It's—it's too close, that's what. To everybody. And it's you. Totally you, Billy. I don't belong in this house. I don't think it even wants me here. All this stuff—she motioned at the books—"I didn't know you read like this. I don't think I have a chance here."
"What you mean is, you're regrettin' everything we've done already," he said in anger, turning loose of her. "This house—my home—it's not good enough for you."
"That's not true. But I have to be alone for a little while."
"In a different room, on another floor from me? Tell me something, Shiloh." He caught her chin in his hard fingers, forcing her to look at him. "Where's the girl who told me we were free, the girl who took off her clothes and gave herself to me, the girl who held me last night and called my name when—-"
"You were different, too, last night," she cut in, her face flaming. "You needed me. Today you're a part of your family. Of this house. You don't need comfort."
He turned loose, swallowing, his own face flushed.
"All right." Billy moved away and looked out the window at the shady backyard. "By God, then, you take that room downstairs. You stay there until you're ready to be my wife. I want the Shiloh I held last night, not somebody seared of belonging to me, and my family, and my home."
"It all happened so fast, Billy," she whispered, and the sound of her voice was so forlorn that his shoulders sagged and the temper went out of him.
"Don't you think I know how hard this is for you?" he asked, then let his hand reach out to brush her cheek lightly with his knuckles. "I've gotta go smooth things over with Mama. I'll tell her that you'll be using that room. Get some rest, baby. You didn't get much last night." 1/1
17
"You've been with this girl four years and we've never heard a peep about it?" Willie demanded dubiously. The cane in his right hand pointed straight at Billy, as unnerving as the staff of Moses indicting an uneasy, but unrepentant, young Pharaoh.
So Billy explained it again, patiently, except for the part about the thirty-five hundred dollars, which he carefully chose to omit.
"... and we met again the night she wrecked her car and they brought her to the jail to wait for her father."
"You sure got married quick as greased lightnin'," Willie continued.
Billy sucked in his breath in exasperation. "I knew what I wanted, Grandpa. I wasn't going to let her get away a second time."
"What you wanted," Ellen said slowly, ignoring her son's face, focusing stubbornly instead on the Bed Delicious apples she was polishing, "belonged to the judge's other son."
"No." Billy's denial was fast and emphatic. "I know what you're thinkin', that I was after Shiloh to get even with the Sewells."
"I won't be the only one thinkin' it," Ellen returned with regret.
"I can't help that. She was mine first. She's mine now." "And it's that easy for you to forget the time she spent with him?"
"Mama." She looked up at last, her busy, worried hands stilling on the fruit. "She's never slept with him."
Ellen's face flushed a dark red, and her mouth primmed at his blunt outspokenness.
"Did I ask to know that?"
"No. But you needed to hear it, didn't you? And I needed to say it."
"Did she tell you she hadn't?"
"Maybe there wasn't any need. For one thing, I think I would have married her, anyway. I love her, Mama."
"Don't sell your soul and ruin your life for love, boy. I couldn't bear it."
"Your mother was a gullible fool." Sewell’s callow, vindictive words sluiced through him like scalding bleach, searing his insides. I hate him, Billy thought, looking down at his mother's pleading face . . . then he shook himself away from the thought. "We're free to be what we can be." Shiloh said that.
"She was a virgin, Mama. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. I was there. I know."
"Oh." Her word was a whispered, flustered moue of sound. Embarrassed, surprised, relieved.
It was Grandpa who broke the awkward silence. "I didn't know they still made them," he said wryly. "Trust you, Billy Bob, to find the last one in the state."
"She's not going to like it that I told you."
"We're not likely to bring it up over the supper table," Ellen retorted with a stab of tartness. "And I don't see that it means a thing, at least, not in some ways. She's still the daughter of a rich man."
"A rich, mean one," Grandpa interpolated.
"I don't care," Billy said stubbornly. "She stood up for me at the jail. She's the reason they let me go. There's enough between us that this can work. I had to try. And right now, she's scared to death. I reckon she's back there at the house crying. She sure looked like she was about to." He remembered uneasily the lost, empty look on her face.
"We ain't gonna bite her," said Grandpa, a little indignantly.
"I told her she could take the bedroom off the kitchen. The one that nobody ever uses." He tried to say it diffidently, without showing how the words rankled, looking down the long row of pecan trees that ran beyond the stand.
There was a tiny silence of surprise. "What's wrong with yours?"
Billy Bob frowned at Willie. Did the old man never show any tact at all? "She likes that room. Nobody says I won't stay there with her, do they? But maybe she needs some time on her own, a place of her own for a few days." His heavy shoulders—too wide for the lankiness of his body—heaved upward, shrugging off the surprised, then pitying, looks of his relatives.
"Don't be a fool, boy." His grandfather levered himself up out of the slat-backed rocking chair, rearing up on the cane to stand pugnaciously before Billy. "You already got two strikes against you with this marriage. If you aim to hold the thing together, you better use any kind of glue you can. You've been keepin' that Blake woman happy for years with just one thing, and she's mighty near an expert on it, I hear. So you better try some of it on this new wife. Don't let her scare you off."
"Daddy!"
"Truth is truth, Ellen."
"I'm not scared."
Willie turned from his belligerent stance toward his daughter and focused his wisdom firmly on his recalcitrant grandson.
"Sure you are. This wife of yours is pretty. Fancy. You said yourself you've been thinkin' about her for a long time. And
on top of all that, she's what we used to call a good woman. They're the scariest kind, boy, especially when you love them. Pure hell on a man. He's always trying to deserve em."
"You'd think he was some kind of expert on women, wouldn't you?" Billy said in exasperation to the sky.
And unexpectedly, Ellen chuckled, her hands moving again, like bumblebees over sweet purple clover as she stacked apples into fat, red potbellied piles. "He reads Cosmopolitan every time we have to stand in line at the Bi-Rite. And I guess she can have that room if she wants it. You should remember, Daddy, it's got two doors, one to the inside hall, and one to the outside porch. Surely to goodness Will can talk his way into one or the other of them. He's your grandson."
She was asleep when he went back to the house at lunch, lying sideways, nearly turned on her stomach in the middle of the patchwork quilt, the bright blue dress tangling around her long brown legs.
Billy's heart turned over, one, good solid flip, as he stood silently in the door watching his young bride sleep. Her thick, waving dark hair spread like a heavy fan over the quilt and the edge of the pillow, sweeping off the rich healthy brown of her tanned forehead, leaving the clean line of her profile clear to his view. One downy, soft tuft of new growth lay against her temple, clinging damply to her skin, its dark silkiness echoed by the long sweep of the eyelashes on her flushed cheeks. It was too warm in the little room in spite of the long row of windows she'd pushed up.
One hand was up under her, her fingers long and slender at the edge of her body, right where the buttons of the blue dress had opened, as if beckoning him. The palm of her hand pressing against her heart pushed her breasts upward; the shadows between them were rich and dusky.
If she hadn't been so nervy this morning, if Grandpa and Mama weren't coming to the house for lunch in a few minutes, if the little room weren't too hot from the noonday sun, Billy would have shut the door behind him, stripped off his clothes, and gone to bed with her.
Billy Bob Walker Got Married Page 26
