Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  “To protect him. And because I was confused.”

  He slammed a palm against the dashboard. “Ah, for Chrissakes, Anna! For Chrissakes!”

  They arrived at the farm just before noon. Anna had only been gone for a day, but it seemed much longer to her, a dream time, an eternity. She heard the familiar chugging of a tractor and saw Atwater perched in his usual seat, the dust billowing up around him. She was sure he hadn’t been anywhere near Napa. Instead, he was hoping to disappear into his work, to become one with the dust. That would be his form of denial, she thought, his method of defense. A pair of field hands, both new to her, were thinning a block of Cabernet Sauvignon near the house, and they took off their caps and made slight but formal bows when she passed them. Her father carried in the suitcase, packed now with her soiled clothes from the canoe trip, and set it on the porch. His judgmental expression had changed to a look of concern.

  “Anything else I can do for you?” he asked. “You can stay with me if you’d rather.”

  “No, I’ll be fine here. I can use some time to think.”

  “He won’t hold it against you forever, Anna. You’ll both get over it in time.”

  She smiled wanly when the old man hugged her. “Such an optimist you are,” she said.

  After he left, Anna sat in a kitchen chair. She had eaten a light breakfast at the hospital and had no appetite for lunch. Her picnic basket was on the floor by the stove, every item in it spotless—courtesy of Arthur, she gathered, and probably his unconscious way of underscoring the extent of her messiness—and she got up and stored it in a closet, sharply aware of her isolation. She had betrayed him, hadn’t she? Anna felt that if he were to attack her with his probing questions right then, she’d be unable to handle it—she would shatter into pieces. The experience would be too intense, too draining, so she locked the front and back doors, withdrew to her bedroom, and slept solidly for several hours.

  The walls had shaded to a dusky blue by the time she roused herself again. She went downstairs to pick at some cheese and bread and noticed that Atwater’s Jeep wasn’t parked in its accustomed spot. He had gone off somewhere without her, and his absence hurt her now. It was an insult, a deliberate affront, Anna thought, and in the vast loneliness of the old farmhouse, with night falling in black sheets, she finally began to weep, wandering aimlessly from room to room, switching on a lamp and turning it off, and staring blankly at the moonlit fields. She lay on the parlor couch with her face buried in a cushion and gave in to the tears and let them flow, an unquenchable tide that rose up from the core of her being as she wept for all the sorrows of the earth, for false hope and simple loss.

  In the morning, she was much better, emptied of her grief. She showered in the hottest water she could stand, scrubbing and scrubbing, and put on some clean clothes. She was still upset with Arthur, still expecting him at any minute, still of two minds. Throughout the long afternoon, Anna kept hearing the scrape of his boots on the porch steps, and she would hurry to the door to embrace him, but there was never anyone outside except for the same pair of field hands who, as in a comic routine based on a repeated irony, bowed and took off their caps each time she appeared. Every now and then, she caught a glimpse of Atwater in the vineyard, ever in motion, a darting animal presence disappearing in the leafy green, and by that evening she was furious with him. If he wanted apartness, she would grant it to him. She wouldn’t stoop to hunting him down.

  There was no point in her staying on until the end of the month, Anna realized, no point to it at all anymore. On the spot, she decided to leave as soon as she could and managed to book a red-eye flight to JFK through Carson Valley Travel at a reasonable price. Her plane departed on Saturday, two days hence. She called Jane Weiss immediately to break the news and get some moral support and her brother to say good-bye. Roger was on his way to Tokyo himself in a couple of weeks, cheerful at the prospect of potential enlightenment. To avoid a mawkish airport scene with her father, Anna phoned around in search of a chauffeur, trying Betty Chambers first, who couldn’t get free, and then Jack Farrell, her eternally devoted suitor, who agreed to do it in a split second.

  She spent most of the next day packing. Late in the afternoon, she allowed herself a hike around the farm, laying claim to it through the naming of names—coast live oak and California buckeye, mesquite and greasewood dotting the far hills, a sharp-shinned hawk in sparkling blue-gray fettle on the branch of a madrona. The specifics of place were something she would take away with her, at any rate, something of value to be salvaged from this grand season of loss. As she strolled up the dirt road for the mail, with Daisy yipping along behind her, she was feeling remarkably calm until she saw Atwater in his Jeep, returning from town. She had been too busy to think much about him, but when he slowed down and offered a listless grin and a dull, defeated wave, she banged on a fender and forced him to stop.

  “Arthur?” She was at his Jeep window. She saw no anger in him, only the pain in his eyes. “Talk to me, please?”

  “I’m having a hard time with this, Anna,” he said, his head lowered. “It’s got me tied up in knots.”

  “Why didn’t you come for me at the hospital? You haven’t even called me.”

  “I came last night,” he told her. “Your door was locked, and the lights were off. I figured to give it a few more days.”

  Anna felt guilty, but she pressed on. “The days are running out, Arthur,” she said quietly. “I’m leaving on Saturday night.”

  He was devastated. That, too, she could see in his eyes, but all he said was, “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “We have to talk before I go. It’s not as though I committed a crime, is it? You do owe me that much.”

  “Nobody owes anybody anything,” he said flatly. “You ought to know that by now.”

  “You do owe me,” she insisted. “Tell me when.”

  “Tomorrow, then.” Atwater glanced away. “In the evening after work. You’ll find me in the barn.”

  Friday turned into Anna’s day for farewells. She began with her father. He had expressed no concrete opinion about her sudden change of plans, only a series of grunts that indicated mild disapproval. From her garden she harvested a sack of vegetables for him, some cherry tomatoes, a half-dozen ears of white corn, and a handful of tiny green beans. The door to his house was wide open when she arrived, and she walked into the living room and through a sliding-glass door into the backyard, where the old man was curled up on the lawn in the shade of some hedges with a pair of grass clippers in his right hand, snoring loudly. Anna laughed out loud, but it didn’t affect him. He just dozed on, the tyrant reduced in size and scale, as vulnerable as anybody now, mortal at last.

  She inspected him closely as he slept, committing him to memory. He had on a ribbed singlet and some faded, ill-fitting madras Bermudas she could not have imagined him owning. When he sucked in a gulp of air, she got a good look at his teeth, all of them yellowed and a few of them chipped, except for his shiny gold-crowned molars. Tufts of springy hair sprouted generously from his ears. The hair on his chest was a downy white, while the hair under his arms was a blend of gray and some youthful strands of black. She studied the scab on his left wrist, his bare feet with their calloused toes and calcified toenails, and the wedding band trapped below his knobby arthritic knuckle, a ring he would wear to the grave. There they are, Anna thought, the loving particulars.

  She watched the steady rise and fall of his rib cage until his eyes fluttered open.

  “Anna?” he asked in a muddled way. “What the hell time is it?”

  “Almost three.”

  With some effort, Torelli heaved himself to a sitting position. Anna heard the snapping complaint of his tendons. “I was out for almost an hour,” he told her, scratching his head. “I don’t sleep that solid at night.”

  “Here, brace yourself against me.”

  The old man struggled to his feet. “Did you hear that Fred Vescio’s getting a new hip? That son of a bitch walks be
tter than I do.”

  “Would you like a new hip?”

  “I’d like a new everything. Come inside where it’s cool.”

  Anna followed him into the house. It was his place now and no one else’s, stale with his odors and cluttered with all the things he had ignored or forgotten, his mangy socks balled up beneath the couch, unopened envelopes from charitable organizations stacked on an end table, and a bowl of pennies yet to be rolled into wrappers and cashed at the bank. A current Valley Herald was spread over an arm of his recliner, its pages open to an article about a new Chinese herbalist on the square, and a few videos were piled next to a rash of clipped coupons, the old man’s idle time measured out in the dimes and quarters that he would someday save on Hamburger Helper and Gino’s Frozen Pizza.

  He made some pink lemonade for them from a can of frozen concentrate, bending over an ice-cube tray in the kitchen sink. The improbable Bermudas slipped farther down his hips to expose the pleated elastic waistband of his underwear.

  “Where did you get those shorts, anyway?” Anna asked him.

  “At a garage sale down the block. You like ’em on me?”

  “They’re lovely.”

  “Guess how much they cost?”

  “I give up.”

  He was beaming. “Two dollars.”

  They sat at a redwood picnic table on the patio to drink their lemonade. The riotous sounds of a weekend afternoon in the suburbs echoed around them, balls bouncing and bicycle bells tinkling.

  “You remember that I’m taking off early tomorrow, don’t you?” Anna asked him.

  “Of course, I do,” he said. “Your flight leaves a little before midnight. I better pick you up, oh, about eight-thirty.”

  “I’ve asked Jack Farrell to drive me down,” Anna told him, holding her breath. “It’s a long trip, and I didn’t want to put you out.”

  She was startled by his reply. “Well, that’s probably right,” her father said. “I don’t see so good at night anymore. Pretty soon, I’ll be creeping around on the back roads like Pepper Harris does.” He laughed. “I’ll tell you what, Anna.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t get old if you can help it.”

  They played a cribbage match, two out of three games. Torelli won, collected $1.05, and once again displayed his uncanny knack for celebrating at his victim’s expense. He walked Anna to the Taurus afterward. She threaded an arm through his as she had done on her wedding day, recalling his dignified bearing and how she had relied on him for support. She had floated around inside her billowy bridal gown, her body fragrant with perfume and aching to be touched. She remembered the crimson carpet down the aisle, the worn mahogany pews, and the women seated in them shedding what she had believed in her innocence to be tears of joy, although she knew better now.

  “It’s been wonderful having you here, Anna,” the old man said, leaning against her car door. “You’re not a grape grower yet, but you’re on your way.”

  “I’ll miss you terribly.” Anna thought she might cry. She would not see him again for a while. She might never see him again, in fact. “I don’t suppose I could coax you to New York for a vacation?”

  “I don’t suppose you could.”

  “Well, the house is here for me. I may surprise you yet and move back in.”

  “That would be a fine surprise, all right,” he said. “What are you doing with that little dog of yours?”

  “I was going to return it to Arthur.”

  “It might not hurt me to have that dog for company.”

  “Are you saying you want Daisy?”

  “I wouldn’t mind having her.”

  Anna was amused that destiny would play such a mean trick on the pup. She touched her father’s hand. “I’ll call you when I get home,” she told him. “Thanks for everything.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “You got it backward. It goes the other way.”

  She drove out to the valley in a good mood, elated to have gotten through the visit without any conflict or stumbling. If she could reach a similar accord with Atwater, she might yet leave the farm on a small grace note. She wondered how to present herself to him as she rummaged through the few clothes she hadn’t packed. In her bureau, she found the lingerie that she had gifted him with in the madness of her passion and inspected it as if it had fallen into the drawer from another planet. That was never me, she thought, not really. But maybe it was someone I was hoping to become, she thought again.

  After deliberating, she chose to go to Arthur as she was, plainly, without any decoration. He was where he said he would be, waiting in the barn. He had done nothing to improve himself either. His hair was uncombed, and an oily streak was splotched across his cheek. Anna took in the strong, familiar smell of him and understood that he was a part of the farm and what she loved about it, and that her time to be with him was truly over.

  “Will you walk with me?” she asked him.

  He looked at her. Again the pain was in his eyes. “Where?”

  “Anywhere. By the river?”

  They started down the path along the edge of the vineyard. The dogs trailed after them, barking and chasing one another, but Atwater spun around and yelled at them so loudly and irritably that they turned tail and ran back to the trailer. Anna was at his side and fumbled for his hand, but he pulled it away from her as though her touch had a corruptive sting. He lengthened his stride and moved a few paces ahead of her, and she was upset again at how wrong everything had gone, but what had she expected? A handshake and a kiss? These affairs always ended badly for her.

  A rank odor off the river colored the air, a stink of frogs and scummy algae, of ooze and mud that hung in the evening heat. Some mallards came winging along the water from the distant oxbow, dark shapes flying in determined splendor until they sensed a human presence and bolted higher into the sky. Anna sat on the big serpentine rock in a wash of fading light that was an electric blue. Atwater crouched a few feet away from her. She was aware of how coiled and tense he was. He didn’t say anything to her at first. Instead, he picked up some pebbles and threw them into the river as a boy might do.

  “Why did you keep it a secret from me, Anna?” he asked at last in a calm voice. “That’s what I keep wrestling with.”

  “I’m not absolutely sure,” she told him, forced into the sort of explaining she had dreaded, that men in their implacable devotion to logic seemed always to require. “What if I said I was enjoying myself? Would that sound strange?”

  “Yes. Because it was at my expense.”

  “No, it wasn’t at your expense.” Anna was frustrated and had to resist an urge to scream at him. “Don’t judge me for a minute, okay? It’s easy to judge somebody else, and you’re very good at it.”

  His face was blank. He let the remark pass. “Go on.”

  “I was enjoying the way I felt, enjoying the changes in my body. Enjoying the fantasy of having a child. Is that so awful? What happened was only an accident.”

  “Accident or not, it hurt,” Atwater said, tossing another pebble. “I wouldn’t hide something like that from you. I’d figure it was your business, too.”

  “Believe me, I wasn’t trying to hide anything! It confused me at first, and I couldn’t decide what to do. Then it got decided for me. A week, ten days, that isn’t a long time, is it? Are you going to let one mistake spoil all the good between us?”

  “I could have helped you decide, Anna. Did that ever occur to you?”

  “Yes, it did. And what would you have said if I’d asked you?”

  Atwater was staring at the river. The space between them was growing, becoming a gulf. “I would have told you to have the kid.”

  Anna was surprised. “Would you really?”

  He nodded. “Sure. Because it might have kept you here with me a while longer.”

  “So it would have been a trap.”

  “That’s right,” Atwater agreed. “It would have been a trap.”

  This is the story we are agreeing to t
ell, Anna thought bitterly. This is the narrative we are evolving to account for the unnaccountable. This will give us something to hold onto, it will allow us to continue. “Then maybe what happened was for the best.”

  “I’d say it was,” he told her. “You’re not cut out for this life, Anna. You don’t belong on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Nothing between us was ever real.”

  “So it seems,” she said halfheartedly. Again she reached for his hand, and again he pulled it away. “Will you always be angry with me?”

  “It isn’t anger. It’s just disappointment. I knew better than to get involved with you. I knew it from the start.”

  “Do you know how much you’ve meant to me?” Anna asked him. “Have I made it clear how much I care?”

  “Yes, you have. But it wasn’t enough for me, was it? That’s my fault. I take the blame for that.” Atwater clambered to his feet. “There’s no sense in any more talk, Anna. It only makes things worse. What’s done is done. I should never have fallen in love with you. But I just couldn’t help myself.”

  He had said the one thing that she hoped he wouldn’t say. “I’m so sorry about everything,” she said, looking away, the sadness everywhere now.

  “Don’t be sorry,” he told her softly. “I do love you, Anna.”

  Atwater did something then that astonished her. He came to her where she sat and gathered her into an embrace that drew all the fire from her. All the strength, all the iron will that she had built up to survive the moment flowed out of her, and she held him tightly and had an intense longing to go back to that time and place when they were in such harmony, two lovers balanced on a dusky porch, birds about them, although she knew it could never be.

  “I’ll call you some time,” she said, feeling his lips against her hair.

  “Don’t do that,” he warned her harshly. “Don’t call me unless you have something I might want to hear.”

  He left her where she stood, marching swiftly up the rise and never pausing for a backward glance. Anna waited almost until dark to walk up the hill herself and saw that his Jeep was gone again. She did the very last of her packing and drank a little wine, touring the old house room by room. How would it look to her on her next visit, and the one after that? Would her father still be alive? And where would Atwater be? How much of him would she carry away with her? She felt a sudden and pressing need to add something essential to their conversation, so she took up a pen and paper and started writing, crossing out one word after another until she had cut through all her attitudes and poses to arrive at a single sentence that seemed just then to be all she could ask of him and all she had to say.