Thalia

by Larry McMurtry

  Him and Joe left for boot camp about two weeks apart. Johnny and me took Joe to the train in Wichita, and I would have taken Jimmy, but he wouldn’t let me. He hitchhiked, and he walked the three miles over to the highway, too; he wouldn’t even let us take him that far. When he was out on the front porch ready to go I gave him twenty dollars but I didn’t try to kiss him. He said good-by and walked out of the yard and off across the pasture without ever looking back. Just before he went over the Ridge he shifted his suitcase to the other hand.

  I sent him a lot of cakes and cookies. He probably wouldn’t like them, but maybe his buddies would.

  Five

  WHEN I STARTED THINKING ABOUT JIMMY I ALWAYS ended up thinking about Eddie. One morning out gathering the eggs I got him on my mind. It was funny, and Jimmy never would have understood it, but if I really done them two things he accused me of, I done them with Eddie, and he was the one I was married to.

  I guess it really was the way the hair on the back of his neck was so shaggy that I liked best about him. A lot of times I felt completely crazy when I was around him, and I didn’t care what I did. That’s why he never liked me very well and was mean to me. He wanted somebody that acted real respectable to play like they was his wife while he went on and did what he pleased.

  But I guess it was a good thing I married him. I read in the paper about these sex fiends who are always killing people because they can’t get enough woman, and it wouldn’t have taken very much of a push to make Eddie one of those. In fact, when he would be after me three or four times a day I thought he was one, and I told him so. It made him so mad he would almost choke me, because he thought I was to blame. He thought I was always stirring him up on purpose. And I did once in a while; but not no four times a day. He didn’t really like me very much.

  “You’re a nasty bitch,” he used to say. He said it so many times it finally quit bothering me. And the less I let things like that bother me, the meaner he got. Lots of times when one of his hounds was in heat he’d grab me and drag me out in the back yard and make me watch while all the dogs fooled around with her. I soon quit fighting that too; it didn’t bother me that much to have to watch. I don’t guess it really bothered me at all.

  “Looky there, sweetie,” he said. “Why, she’s just like you, ain’t she? Just the same. What do you think about that sight?”

  I wouldn’t answer, or wouldn’t say much. “It’s just dogs breeding; it ain’t too unusual,” I said. Once in a while he would be fiddling around with me and make me mad.

  “Well, honey,” I said one time, “I didn’t know you like to watch so much. I feel sorry for you. Let’s go in and move the mirror over by the bed, so you can watch us.” I knew how to take up for myself where Eddie was concerned.

  What I said surprised him, but he couldn’t back out. “All right, by god, let’s do,” he said. We went in and moved the mirror. I liked to drove him crazy that day. Eddie had to feel that he was the most exciting man that ever went in me, and when I didn’t let him feel that way, he squirmed. That day we moved the mirror I lay there and laughed and giggled at him for fifteen minutes, and I could have been a feather pillow for all the good he was doing. He knew it, too. Every time he looked in the mirror I was grinning at him. I guess that was one of the times I hated him because I had married him instead of Gid. That was the time he squeezed my hand so hard he broke my next to littlest finger.

  “I’m tired of your goddamn laughing, let’s see you cry a little,” he said, and squeezed it. But I wouldn’t cry, either, I just looked at him, and he got up and dressed and went to Oklahoma and was gone six weeks. About the time he came back I got pregnant with Jimmy.

  Our times weren’t always bad though, mine and Eddie’s. I was only mean to him four or five times, when I couldn’t help it. He would come in sometimes when I was washing dishes and grin at me and untie my apron and stand there behind me, fiddling with my hair or rubbing my neck or back or sides or front till I would finally turn around and kiss him, and leave soap on his shirt.

  I never seen but one of his girl friends; she was a redhead. She was at his funeral, and she came in with Eddie’s sister Lorine. Lorine didn’t mind letting me know that the redhead was the girl Eddie ought to have married. They never brought Eddie home after he was killed; he was buried in Chickisha, Oklahoma, where Lorine lived. I went up there on a train; it was the longest trip I ever made in my life; it was right in February, cold and rainy. Eddie looked nice. I didn’t think the redheaded girl was too pretty, and she didn’t act very kind. I rode all night on the train, back to Henrietta; it was a pretty sad trip for me. I kept seeing my face in the train windows; I couldn’t see out at all. It was hard for me to believe Eddie was dead; I kept thinking I would feel his hands on me agin. When I got off the train in Henrietta it was after sunup, and Johnny and the boys were there waiting; I had left them with him, and they stayed in a little hotel; it was the first time the boys had ever been away from home. Johnny looked tired—I guess they had run him ragged—but I was so glad to see him. When they saw me the boys were too timid to say anything, but Johnny came up and put his hand on my forehead; his hand was so cool.

  “Molly, you’ve got fever, honey,” he said. “You’ve worried yourself sick.”

  “I sure don’t like to travel,” I said. I squatted down so the boys would see I wasn’t mad at them, and they came and hugged my neck. Johnny bought them some doughnuts for breakfast; they hadn’t ever had any before. Neither had I, I don’t guess. While we ate he fixed the tarp over the wagon; it was drizzling rain. We had plenty of quilts and he fixed us a good pallet and me and the boys curled up and slept nearly all the way home. The boys were just worn out from missing me. They didn’t let me out of their sight for days. Just before we got home I woke up and got on the seat with Johnny. He tried to make me wrap up, but the misty rain felt good. When we seen the house up on the hill, I cried till we got to it. That night I woke up in the bed and Johnny was asleep and snoring, with his arm around me. I kept imagining Eddie, but it would never be Eddie agin. I cried till the hairs on Johnny’s arm were all wet, but he never did wake up.

  I HAD the eggs gathered and was changing the chickens’ water when Gid and Johnny drove up in Gid’s car. They never got out but sat by the back gate with the motor running, watching me. I knew they wouldn’t be staying no time, or they would already be out of the car and in the kitchen, so I went on and fixed the water. Gid was in a hurry somewhere and Johnny had just managed to stall him a little while by coming by to say hello to me.

  “Boy, I’m sure having a scrumptious dinner today,” I said when I did get over to the car. Gid still had his gloves on and his hand on the steering wheel.

  “Well, I hope you’ve got a big appetite, so you can eat it all,” he said. “We’ve got two days’ work to do before dinnertime. How are you?”

  “Except for being short of company, I’m fine,” I said. “You look awful prosperous today.”

  “Hell, he is,” Johnny said. “Who wouldn’t be, hiring cheap help like me?”

  I walked around to his side.

  “That was dangerous,” he said. “Didn’t you know Gid had his foot on the footfeed? He might have run right over you.”

  “I ain’t that bad,” Gid said.

  “I should have gone around behind,” I said.

  “No, you should have climbed over. He’s just as apt to back up as he is to go forward.”

  They kidded with me a minute and said they would see me in a day or two; then they left. I got a little blue, because I knew some day I would have to show Gid the letter from Jimmy. It would nearly kill him. But the war would be over some day, and there wasn’t much hope of getting out of it.

  GID NEVER understood much about sex stuff, or at least I didn’t think he did. Maybe I didn’t understand it, or was wrong about it. I guess we were just raised different. Except for that one time with Richard, Dad never mentioned it—and then he hadn’t been talking to me, anyway. Momma died when I
was still pretty young, but she wouldn’t have said anything about sex if I had got up one morning with triplets. It just wasn’t nothing Momma would have talked about. Whatever ideas us kids had about it, we come up with on our own. I guess I just didn’t have the background for thinking it was especially wrong; by the time I was eighteen or nineteen I would just as soon have had a baby as not.

  Gid and Johnny were the boys I started out liking, and they weren’t really go-getters in that respect. I guess their folks had thrown a scare into them. Then Eddie came along, and he knew just exactly what he was after and how to go about getting it. I didn’t have no idea atall how to stop him, or even that I was supposed to stop him. Besides, Eddie was exciting. But I hadn’t seen him five times when he got me down where I couldn’t get up, and then it wasn’t exciting, it was just plain hurting. I yelled to beat the band. It didn’t matter to Eddie. And he hurt me ever time, for six months or a year; I couldn’t see why a woman would ever want anybody to do her that way. But then I kinda begin to see one reason why: it was because a man needed it, and had it all tangled up with his pride, so that it was a sure way of helping him or hurting him, whichever you wanted to do. I hadn’t been doing nothing atall for Eddie; just letting him have a good time. He was really nasty about it and I thought I’d quit him. Only before I did I started getting where I enjoyed it as much as he did; then I got so I enjoyed it more than he did. And that’s when he quit caring anything about me: because he didn’t want me to like it—not for my sake—he just wanted me not to be able to help liking it if it was him doing it. But of course I could help it, and by that time anyway Gid and Johnny had got a whole lot bolder, and I seen where it could really do wonderful things for a man if a woman cared to take a few pains with him.

  I guess for a while I must have been pretty exciting to Eddie. It was after Joe was born that he completely quit caring about me. He still fooled around with me a lot, but he quit paying any attention to whether I liked it or not. He done what he pleased, and when he got done he stopped. One day I was just laying there watching him, and he said so.

  “Well, there ain’t but so much peaches and cream in any one bowl,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “And when they’re all eaten up you don’t have nothing left but a dirty dish.”

  I think Eddie just married me to show up Johnny and Gid.

  GID WAS just the opposite of Eddie. He thought I was nice and pure and he was nasty and bad—it shocked him to death to find out he wasn’t my first boy. He just couldn’t believe sex was right. I don’t guess he left my bedroom five times in his life that he wasn’t ashamed of himself—in spite of all I done. I had to be careful where I touched him or he would jump like he was electrocuted. But he was the thoughtfulest man I knew, and took the most interest in me. He just wasn’t able to understand that I loved him and wanted him to enjoy himself—he got it in his head, but he never got it in his bones.

  Old Johnny did though. He had more pure talent for enjoying himself than Gid and Eddie put together. He could enjoy himself and pat me on the shoulder and sleep for a week, and I loved that about him. The right or wrong of it seldom entered Johnny’s mind.

  I ALWAYS wished I had known Gid’s daddy better. I think he could have straightened me out on a lot of things that it took me years to learn by myself. He had the highest standards of any man I ever knew—to this day Gid worries because he can’t live up to those standards of his dad’s.

  One evening three or four months before he died me and him had a little talk. We were sitting at his kitchen table; Gid was out doing chores. I went over there a few times and cooked supper; they had had to batch for so long I felt sorry for them. Mr. Fry was in pain a lot of the time. I think he liked me, but I was always a little scared of him.

  “Well,” he said. “Some have to take and some have to give, and a very few can do both. I was always just a taker, but I was damn particular about what I took, and that’s important.”

  “Why, Mr. Fry,” I said. “Look at all you’ve give Gid.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “A good ranch he ain’t old enough to want and a lot of advice he ain’t constructed to use.

  “Them biscuits smell good,” he said. “Let’s get a head start on old Gid.”

  He buttered himself four biscuits. But I still had my mind on what he said.

  “I don’t guess I’ve ever done much of either one,” I said.

  “Aw hell,” he said. “You could take a million dollars’ worth, if you would. But instead you’ll give out twice that much to sorry bastards that don’t deserve it. And they won’t put much back. I’m glad you and Gid won’t marry. You’d smother him in sweetweed and he’d loaf the rest of his life. Misery makes a man work.”

  I was embarrassed, and he went on and ate his biscuits.

  “Anyway, it ain’t hurt your cooking,” he said, and he looked up and gave me one of the longest looks I ever had in my life. I remembered that look a hundred times, whenever Gid or Jimmy looked at me across a table; they both had Mr. Fry’s eyes.

  “Molly, if I was just ten years younger I’d take your whole two million myself,” he said. “The rest of the pack could go hungry. Gid would probably be the first one starved.”

  I couldn’t say a word. My legs trembled, and I was glad they were under the table. I was looking at his hands. Finally he took a match out of his pocket and whittled it into a toothpick. I thought when I seen him in his coffin that if he had been ten years younger he would probably have done just what he said.

  Six

  ON THE LAST DAY OF JULY I WENT INTO TOWN TO GET some groceries and my mail, and to buy a war bond. Old Washington at the feed store had some new kind of chicken feed he wanted to sell me, and I stood around there talking to him about one thing and another till the middle of the morning. I never did buy the feed; I had more eggs than I knew what to do with anyway. I bought the war bond though—it was about the only patriotic thing I knew to do. When the war started they made me a plane spotter and gave me a lot of materials on what to look for, but no airplanes ever came over except the oil company’s Piper cub, flying the pipelines. Once in a while a big one would go over at night, but I couldn’t tell anything about it.

  I stopped in the drugstore a minute and drank a four hundred, and then went to the post office. My Good Housekeeping had come, and a new Reader’s Digest, and the rest of the box was full of sale circulars of one kind and another. When I pulled all them out, the letter dropped on the floor. I threw all the circulars in a wastebasket before I picked it up. Then I went over to the counter and opened it and read it, and my mouth felt dry, it felt like my lips were chapped. People kept going by me to get their mail; I don’t know who; they were just like shadows. Finally Old Man Berdeau, the postmaster, came out and tacked some kind of notice on the bulletin board, and then he came over to me and offered me his handkerchief. I didn’t think I was crying, but I was.

  “I’m mighty sorry, Mrs. White,” he said. “I guess they’re going to get all the boys before it’s over.”

  It was a month before I remembered to give him back his handkerchief. I walked out and started to look for Gid. I knew he had built a new house on the west side of town. On what they called Silk Stocking Avenue; he said they ought to call it Mortgage Row. People in cars kept stopping and offering me rides. I don’t know what I said to them. I knew the house by Gid’s car setting in front of it; then I seen him way at the back, digging postholes; he was putting up some kind of pen. He looked so surprised when I came running up to him; I put my face against his chest, so I couldn’t see anything. I could smell the starch on his shirt and the sweat under his arms when he put them around me.

  “They killed my last old boy,” I said.

  “Molly, would you like to go in?” I looked at his house a minute, it was a big ugly brick house.

  “Let’s go home,” I said.

  He took me to his car and put me in the front seat. “I’ve got to go in a minute,” he said. I was hoping h
e wouldn’t bring Mabel out, and he didn’t. We went off.

  “Stop at the post office a minute,” I said. “I left my magazines.” He went in and got them; Mr. Berdeau had put them up.

  When we crossed Onion Creek I scooted over by him. “What’s life going to leave me?” I said. And when we stopped at the back gate I noticed the car wasn’t there. It was still parked at the post office, with the groceries in it.

  I didn’t really see Gid till we were sitting at the kitchen table. I had drunk my coffee but his was getting cold in the cup, and I reached out and put my hand on his wrist. When I saw the look in his eye I was ashamed of myself for being so selfish.

  “Drink your coffee,” I said.

  And I quit grieving for Jimmy; it was strange to feel myself quitting, but I couldn’t have cried any more right then if I had wanted to. I didn’t really think about him agin that day, and when I did the next day it was not me losing Jimmy I thought about, it was Jimmy losing his life and never getting to have it.

  Gid was there with me, at the table; I had never in my life been able to think of two men at a time. One would always crowd the other out.

  “Stay here tonight,” I said.

  That afternoon we sat on the porch, in the glider, and Gid talked more than he ever had in his life. He told me about his business, and his trouble with Mabel, and a lot of other things. It was a hot day, and we could see the heat waves rising off the pastures. I had a hold of one of Gid’s arms.

  “We’re the ones should have got married,” he said, during the afternoon. I didn’t say anything. I never did like to think about how much better things might have turned out if we hadn’t acted like we did. We did act like we did, and some bad things happened, but others would have happened if we had acted some other way.

  We did the chores and I cooked us a little supper and we turned on the lights and sat in the living room, and there wasn’t much to do.