Thalia

by Larry McMurtry

  “Now ain’t this some way for old married folks to be acting?” I said.

  She grinned, but it was just half a grin, really, and her mouth quivered.

  “It’s nice, though,” she said. “I’m so glad to see you. Let’s go in the house.”

  I helped her up and put my arm around her; we let the tablecloth and the clothespins lie where they fell. I asked her if she wanted to finish hanging out the washing, and she shook her head.

  “No, but let’s sit on the cellar awhile,” she said. “It’s too pretty to go in; I just don’t like to sit on the dewy grass.”

  The cellar was stone, and the sun had warmed it up. She held one of my hands.

  “Where’s Eddie?” I said.

  “Just relax,” she said. She knew what I was thinking. “He’s gone to Oklahoma, working in the oil fields.”

  “Good lord,” I said. “He’s a strange feller. I don’t see how he can stand to go off and leave somebody like you.”

  She snickered. “That’s because you ain’t Eddie. He ain’t the married kind. He’d go crazy if he couldn’t get off and run around.”

  I wanted to ask her why in the hell she married him, then, but I bit my tongue and didn’t.

  Molly was in the sweetest, happiest mood. She kept glancing at me and smiling and she rubbed my hand between hers.

  “Well, I’m just so glad to see you,” she said, and in a minute turned around and kissed me. I held onto her for a long time, and then I figured I better tell her something for her own good. Only she knew what was on my mind agin.

  “Don’t be so scared,” she said. “That no way to make me happy. It’s just us here, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. “And you’re the sweetest woman I ever had hold of, I don’t mind saying that. But now listen. We got to get something straight. I’m married and you’re married, and I ain’t the shy old kid I used to be.”

  “Good,” she said, grinning. “What’s shy got to do with it?” She reached up and pulled a thread off my shirt collar and rubbed my neck with her hand.

  “It’s got a lot,” I said. “This kissing and hugging is just inviting it. The state I’m in, it’s whole hog or nothing.”

  “That’s so nice,” she said. “One thing I’ve always hoped is that you’d come over here some day ready to be whole hog in love with me. I hoped sooner or later you would.”

  That just flabbergasted me.

  “Honey, good lord,” I said. “I been whole hog in love with you for the last ten years. Maybe more. Surely you know that.”

  She looked me in the eye for a long time, a little sad, with one corner of her mouth turned up just a little. “I know you think so,” she said. “But you haven’t, Gid. You ain’t even this morning, yet.”

  “Well, what do you mean, whole hog?” I said. It seemed to me, looking at her with her face so close to mine, that it was impossible to love a person more than I loved her, and the way she sent that cool look up at me made me mad. I could have hated her. It was a bad feeling; I felt myself getting mad, and I didn’t want to.

  “I mean just you loving me,” she said. “And nothin’ else. Just pure me and pure you. But you’re always thinking about Johnny or Eddie or your ranch or your dad or what people will think, or what’s right and what’s wrong, something like that. Or else you’re thinking about yourself, and how much you like me. Or else you just want to get me in bed. Or else you just like to think about having me for a girl. That ain’t loving nobody much. I can tell that.”

  “Why, goddamn you,” I said. “That’s some way for you to talk.” I was thinking about her marrying Eddie.

  “That’s the way I’ve always talked to you, darling,” she said. “You ain’t thinking about me, you’re thinking about Eddie.” She reached up her hand to my cheek and smiled, but I was too mad then to care; it was like my blood vessels had busted. I yanked her back across the cellar, I seen later where it skinned her leg, and held her down and kissed her. It’s a wonder she didn’t get fever blisters. And for a long time we stayed that way, and she kissed back, only I knew it wasn’t working somehow, it wasn’t convincing her of anything. I let up and looked at her: she felt warm but she still looked cool, and there was a terrible strain inside me; I didn’t know what to do or how.

  “Molly, what do I have to do?” I said. “You drive me half-crazy, don’t you know that?”

  “I wish I could drive you all the way,” she said, holding my hand against her chest. I could feel her breathing.

  “I didn’t know you were like that,” I said. “Why do you want to hurt me that way?”

  “Oh Gid,” she said, and tears come in her eyes, “I don’t want to hurt you. I just want you to turn loose of yourself for a minute, so you can hold me. That’s the only thing I want.”

  She got upset then and cried and I was ashamed of myself for getting mad. At the same time I was still mad. I didn’t see how she could go marry Eddie and then expect much of me. But I didn’t want her sad.

  “I just don’t guess I know how to do that,” I said. “If I did I would.”

  She sat up and wiped away the tears and smiled at me, her cheeks still wet. “I know you don’t,” she said. “But maybe I can show you.”

  She took me in the house then, and it was nice and cool and shady, after the sunshine. I made her let me put some iodine on the big skinned place on her leg; it burned like the devil. I felt silly, to have done a rough thing like that. But Molly never mentioned it. I was all nervous and tense and jumpy and nearly sick, and she kind of loved it all out of me, like a fever. I was so upset that for a long time after we had done it I couldn’t go to sleep or be still in the bed, but she stayed with me, I remember her face, and I finally did sleep and slept good. When I woke up the afternoon sun was pouring in the windows and the room was hot. Molly was still with me and was holding my hand against her chest. She had thrown all the covers back.

  “You’re a good sleeper once you get to sleep,” she said. “You slept four hours without even turning over.”

  I pulled her down so my face was right against hers. “I’m not going to let you go,” I said. “I’m going to give you everything I’ve got to give; you’re the only person that’s worth it. I don’t know why you wanted to take up with somebody worthless like me agin, but it’s too late for you now.”

  She swung her head back to get her hair out of her eyes, and it fell all over my face. I lay for a hour, I guess, smelling her and listening to her breath; I could tell she was pleased about something. She was a mystery to me, but I was glad I had finally pleased her someway. After a while the sun moved and the sunlight came right on the bed, so we were laying in a shaft of it, with a million little dustmotes in the air above us. Things looked lovely and funny for a change.

  “I swear you smell like a gourd, Molly,” I said. “I never noticed that before.”

  “Maybe I never smelled that way before,” she said. “I’m starving, you stay here and let me get us something to eat.”

  I was pretty hungry too. Only not hungry enough to get up; I never felt so good and lazy in my life. Maybe I would just stay there in Molly’s bed for a month or two. That would have set people on their ears. Molly crawled out and wound up her hair, standing by the bed with the sunlight across her stomach.

  “You’re a shapely hussy,” I said.

  She snickered and pulled on her Levi’s. I must have dozed off agin for a little while. When I opened my eyes she was sitting on the bed cross-legged, with just her Levi’s on, eating a piece of cornbread and drinking buttermilk. There was some for me, with a couple of pieces of cold chicken, sitting on a chair by the bed. It wasn’t there long. When we finished there were cornbread crumbs all over the bed and Molly had buttermilk on her upper lip. I wiped it off with a corner of the sheet. I wanted her to lay down agin, but there were so many cornbread crumbs in the bed that it wouldn’t do, so we both got up and I put on my pants and we went in the living room and sat on the couch and hugged and talked awhile. />
  “When I come over here today I was going to ask you a lot of questions,” I said. “Like why you married him, and all that. But I’ve just about forgot the questions, and I don’t guess I really care about the ones I remember. What do you reckon caused that?”

  “Me, I guess,” she said. She was eating a piece of stick candy she had found somewhere, and was slouched back against my arm without nothing on but her pants, just as relaxed as she could be, and in a perfect humor. She wouldn’t let me have any of the candy, but when I kissed her now and then I got her taste and the candy’s too.

  “One thing I do want to settle, Molly. What do you want to do about these people we’re married to? Do you want us to go off somewhere or anything like that?”

  “Do you want to go?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “That’s kind of against my style.”

  “I’m glad,” she said. “Because I wouldn’t go. Right here in this house is where I always want to live.”

  We got a quilt and stretched out together on the living room floor and stayed there till plumb dark. I just couldn’t quite get my mind made up to go home, and she didn’t hurry me.

  “Gid, I’m ready to have a baby now,” she said. “I’m convinced you’ll make a good daddy.”

  “Good lord,” I said, sitting up. It was all shadowy in the room; she rested her head against my chest. We sure didn’t get very far from one another that day. I guess she had been as lonesome as me.

  “You’re a strange woman,” I said. “How come you don’t want your husband for its daddy?”

  “Oh, Gid,” she said, “he wouldn’t make no good daddy. Not as good a one as you.

  “You don’t really care, do you?” she said, looking up at me. I could barely see her eyes, but her voice was real serious. “I mean if me and you have a baby. Of course I’ll let on it’s Eddie’s, just you and me and the baby will know.”

  I thought about it a long time. Here I was married to Mabel and her to Eddie. It was strange to think of a baby coming out of Molly, but I knew one thing, if one did I wanted it to be mine.

  “No, I don’t care, sweetheart. I’d like for you to if you want to.”

  She curled around me. “I knew you’d come to me sometime,” she said. And that was all we said that day. After a while I got up and dressed to go, and she walked out to my horse with me. We stood there awhile, looking at the Milky Way and the Big Dipper and all the rest of the summer stars. Finally I got on.

  “I’ll just get over when I can,” I said. “Okay? I probably can’t stay this long ever time. I sure will miss you.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Me too.”

  I rode on home by moonlight; it was bright enough I seen a big old coyote loping into the brush ahead of me. I should have been thinking about a story for Mabel, I guess, but I was thinking about Molly instead, and what a tender sort of person she was. And yet she had something fierce in her, like Dad had in him. I saw her agin, all the ways she’d looked that day, hanging up clothes in the morning, with her shirttail out, and sitting on the couch that evening, without no shirttail atall. She had the most changing kind of face, for it always to be the same one. Riding across the League I run into Dad’s old horse, and he nickered. I sure did miss Dad.

  Twenty-One

  IT WAS JUST AMAZING HOW SEEING MOLLY EVER ONCE IN A awhile improved things for me. I begin to kinda take an interest in life agin. And I never seen a whole lot of her, either—I hardly ever got over more than once a week. Lots of time I was too busy, and other times, when I did ride over, I’d see Eddie’s car and have to go back. There wasn’t no sense aggravating him. But it didn’t bother me too much if I missed seeing her one occasion or another. I knew that if I was a little patient, there would be a time when we could get together. Those times were worth the wait. Molly was awful good to me.

  AND GOOD for me, too. In the meantime, between visits to her, I had the ranch to run, and Mabel to live with, and I began to see that I had better get busy and try to do a little better job of both than I had been doing. It wasn’t fair to Dad and Mabel not to.

  At first I was pretty worried that Mabel would find out I was courting somebody else, but that was just because I still didn’t know Mabel too well. In those days she was so proud of herself I couldn’t have convinced her I was in love with somebody else if I’d come right out and told her. Which I didn’t. I was fond of Mabel, and a little sad for her, but not as torn up about marrying her as I had been. And I made her a pretty decent husband too. I got to understanding her a lot better as time went on. We never was much of a delight to one another, I had to admit that, but I know I treated her better after I took up with Molly. Mabel was just a combination of proud and scared; she never had anything, and she always thought she was entitled to everything. It made me blue that I couldn’t be more wholehearted with her, but I just couldn’t. She wasn’t the one. But anyway, she kept such a close eye on herself all the time that she hardly noticed me. She didn’t have much notion of what was going on with me, and a good thing she didn’t. After I got over my first blueness and began to treat her about half-nice, she thought I was plumb crazy about her.

  “Well, I see you’re beginning to learn how to treat a lady,” she said one night. It was after supper, and we were sitting on the porch. I had complimented her on her cobbler, or something like that.

  “I guess I ain’t had much practice,” I said.

  “Well, you can get a lot on me,” she said. “And don’t think I won’t tell you when you make a mistake. I ain’t bashful about that.” She scooted a little closer to me on the step.

  I put my arm around her and hugged her and never said a word. It was dark, and we could hear an old hoot owl hooting somewhere in the pastures to the east. There wasn’t no moon that night, but there was a good breeze from the southeast, and the country smelled good. We done had lilac in the yard. Life always seemed so complicated in the evenings. Mabel seemed perfectly happy, and I was sitting with my arm around her, about two-thirds melancholy. “Let’s go in, honey,” I said, “before the mosquitoes get to biting.” “Well, you’ve got to kiss me first,” she said. I did, and then we went inside and lit the lamps.

  Twenty-Two

  EARLY IN JUNE I SPENT A HELL OF A DAY. MABEL WOKE UP in a bossy mood and practically chased me out of the house, so I done the chores and doctored a few sicklings and then decided I’d go to Antelope. That was where we got our mail, then, and I thought while I was there I’d hire somebody to come up and thrash my wheat. We had a pretty fair wheat crop and I was ready to get it thrashed; it was the last farm produce I ever intended to raise.

  I rode old Dirtdobber that day, and I guess that was a mistake. He was the oldest horse on the place, and I never rode him nowhere except to get the mail. I think he was twenty-three years old. When I got to Antelope I tied him up and gave him a good rest, while I talked with the boys a little. I found an old boy with a thresher, said he’d be up after my wheat the next day. While I was fiddling around it come up a real mean-looking cloud in the northwest, and I figured then I’d do good to get home without getting wet. Besides which, the Montgomery Ward catalogue had come that day, and it was so much extra weight I didn’t know if old Dirt would be able to carry it. He was particular about weight.

  But I stuck the catalogue in my saddle pouch, and we headed out. If it rained like it looked like it aimed to, that old boy wouldn’t have to bother about my wheat. But I was wrong about the rain, it never rained five drops. What it did was hail.

  And I mean hailed. It started out the size of plums and moved up to pullet eggs, and before it was done there was hailstones on the ground bigger than anything our old turkeys ever hatched. Course me and Dirt were right out in the open when it started, and getting him to run was out of the question. I tried holding the catalogue over my head, and dropped it in about two minutes. Finally we got to a little old half-grown post oak, and I figured that was the best protection we would find. I unsaddled right quick and crawled under Dirt
and then under the saddle too, and scrunched down tight. The first thing Dirt did was try to piss on me, but I wasn’t worried about that, I was worried about my skull. I jobbed him a time or two to cut him off and damned if the old sonofabitch didn’t jerk loose and step right on my hip and run off. So far as I was concerned it could hail him to death; I wasn’t going after him. I got on the downwind side of the tree and hid as much of me as I could under the saddle, and stayed put. At least none of the big ones hit my head. My saddle got dents in it that never did come out. It hailed for a solid hour. Finally I didn’t have to worry so much, I reached out and raked me up a kind of igloo and was pretty cozy. I had one less worry anyway, and that was the damn wheat crop.

  When it quit the country looked like it was under a snowstorm. The sun came out in a little while and started melting it off, but some of the big piles didn’t melt for two or three days. I was in a hell of a shape; Dirt had about halfway squashed my hip. I could hobble along, but carrying the saddle and blanket I couldn’t make no time, particularly over that slippery hail. I guess Dirt had weathered it all right; I seen him about half a mile away, poking along toward home. “You old bastard,” I said, “wait till I catch you.” But all I could do was hobble on over to the Eldenfelders’, they was a Dutch family that lived about half a mile away. I hated to run the risk of getting dog-bit—they had about fifty damn mean turd hounds—but it was the only place in hobbling distance. However, it turned out all right. They fed me a little rotten cowmeat and sent their big old dumb girl Annie to haul me home. A lot of the boys thought it was smart to get in Annie’s pants, because she was willing and about a half-idiot, but I never fooled with her. She seemed kind of pathetic to me. The creek was up, so that was as far as she got me, but I gave her a dollar. “Bye-bye,” she said. It’s a wonder she could drive the wagon. I waded the creek and went on home. My hip was beginning to unsquash a little by then.

  Old Dirt was in the barn when I got there, trying to kick in the door to the oatbin. The old fart had so many knots on him I didn’t have the heart not to feed him.