What Love Sees

by Susan Vreeland

  “Can you smell the mint?” she asked.

  “Yeah. We must have stepped on it. There’s a lot of it here under the elm.”

  “It smells like it painted the air.” That sounds like Icy, she thought. The ache stabbed again. “What’s that song you were humming?” she asked. “I’ve never heard it before.”

  “It’s about a swing.” He put words to the melody.

  “Swing-ing, swing-ing,

  We look all around

  And hear the sweet sound

  Of swing-ing, swing-ing.” Forrest’s child voice singing had a new softness, it seemed to her, an innocent wonder at what the world had to offer.

  “All around us there below

  Birdies sing and flowers grow,

  Ponies prance and breezes blow.

  Life is joyous, this we know;

  Love’s around us where we go.

  There’s nothing quite so gladdening

  As summer in a swing.”

  “Oh, that’s precious. Teach it to the children.” She turned her face toward him with a new admiration, this man who could do heavy work outside, who made bricks, raised cattle, but who, in the privacy of the night, could sing a child’s song and make it eloquent. “Where did you learn it?”

  “In third grade. But I sang it at a talent show in high school. After about three or four lines people started to laugh, but I finished it anyway.” He chuckled. “Then I sang it again.”

  That’s Forrest, even then unwilling to succumb. She felt enfolded in peace.

  “Forrest?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I love you.”

  She felt him pull on her swing chain until they were close together. He found her face with his other hand and kissed her, a fine big kiss sufficient in itself. They sat, their swings drawn together, each one waiting for the other to move first.

  “Do you think there’s a moon tonight?” She wanted there to be one.

  “Yup.”

  “How can you tell for sure?”

  “I can feel it.”

  She thought of the moon smiling down at them through the vast, empty air, amused by two children playing in the darkness.

  “Me, too.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The next morning Jean sat at the picnic table in the kitchen with a cup of tea and toast. Faith made baby sounds from the playpen and Forrie moved around near her, doing just what, she wasn’t quite sure. She sang dreamily, “Life is joyous, this we know. Love’s around us where we go. There’s nothing quite so gladdening as summer in a swing.” She took a sip of tea but drew the cup away. Something tickled her mouth and gave her a queer, repulsive feeling. She dipped her spoon in, brought it up and gingerly touched the bowl of the spoon. Something was in it. Two flies. Ugh. Disgusting. She dipped in again and brought out some more. She threw down the spoon and pushed back from the table. Her throat tightened and she swallowed and grimaced, squinting her eyes.

  A muffled little-boy sound came from behind her, a mixture of glee and fear accompanied by an intake of breath. The realization struck. She knew there probably were dead flies on all the windowsills. With horses and turkeys nearby, flies were always in the air. But Forrie using them as a way to tease her—that was too much, too cruel. She winced at the imaginary hyena laughter of the gods. In one flash, the source of her happiness in motherhood had become a vehicle for the world’s taunt, reminding her of her limits, snatching back the settled happiness of the night before. It seemed an unexpected swipe taken at her by the universe and it flattened her.

  She knew she should discipline him. “Forrie,” she said, but she didn’t trust her voice. It wavered and lacked authority. The old problem. “That’s an awful thing to do.” Forrie slunk away out of her hearing. The cup rattled in the saucer when she stood up to pour the tea down the sink. The morning was soured irrevocably.

  A week passed before she could tell Forrest about the episode. After dinner and children’s bedtime, she took his hand. “Got your shoes on?” She took him outside to the Chinese elm and they sat in the swings again. With a steady voice she explained what Forrie had done. His silence told her he knew the significance—deceit and exploitation by their children, as well as by the world. The swings hung motionless. The off-key sound of crickets filled in the empty time. Jean knew he would chafe at the incident, but she hadn’t expected it to silence him.

  The swing chain creaked as Forrest shifted his weight. “Tell me something good about Forrie.” His voice was a monotone, flat and tired.

  She trailed her feet in the earth and walked her swing seat back and forth slightly. She knew what he wanted, to turn around her thinking. And she wanted it, too. She thought a moment. “Yesterday when I went over to Heddy and Karl’s, Forrie was leading me, and I guess he looked up at the sky or clouds and he said, ‘There’s Mr. and Mrs. Wind.’”

  “Yeah?” His swing moved some. “Mr. and Mrs. Wind,” he repeated.

  “And on the way to Franny’s once, I think he led me around a puddle in the path.”

  “He’s done that for me, too, with a rut or something.”

  “When do you think he learned we couldn’t see?”

  “Early. Real early. As soon as he could walk. When I used to roll a ball across the floor to him, he’d bring it back and put it in my hand, but Ed said that when he did it with him, Forrie just rolled the ball back. He knew the difference.”

  They thought of as many positive things about Forrie as they could to reduce the injury of the flies. The coolness bathed Jean’s face and neck. She felt refreshed by the slight dampness in the night air. Or maybe it was because she had told Forrest and, once the mistreatment was shared, it had diminished. She reached for his swing chain, found his arm and followed it where it rested on his thigh. He put his hand on top of hers.

  Eventually, Forrest stood up. “I want to show you how far they’ve gotten on the house. They put the rafters up today, and I want you to see the dandy way they’re put together.”

  “I’m not tall enough,” she said as they made their way over to the adobe.

  “You can climb up there. I found a way. I did it this afternoon. It’s real easy.”

  “Easy! Easy to fall through!”

  “No, you won’t. I’ll hold you.”

  “I stopped climbing on roofs when I was twelve.”

  “Just put your feet where I tell you.”

  So here it was again, Forrest getting her to ride western, to walk out into the open pasture, to do things, sometimes absurd things, that she would never attempt on her own. It made her think of Miss Weaver’s, “Of course you can, Jean.” Not too willingly, she climbed up a ladder and put her knees and feet just where he told her, tightly grasping the beams where he put her hands. She reached for the next rafter, stretched, and felt only space. She screamed.

  “You okay?”

  Her stomach contracted and she regained balance in an instant. “I guess so, but my stomach flipped.”

  “Your stomach flipped because you looked down. Don’t look down.”

  “I didn’t look down, but my stomach flipped anyway. I’m out of my mind to be up here on an unfinished roof.” She barely breathed as Forrest explained how the joints in the rafters were designed. Feet on the ground moments later, she took a deep, relaxed breath. “This is one I’ll never tell Mother.”

  Two months later, Father sent her a plane ticket for a trip back to Bristol. She told them only of the lovely new house that was taking shape with money Father had sent. She told them of the rough texture of adobe walls and the spaciousness of the rooms, of the brick hearth and the Mexican tile flooring. She thanked Father for his help. And she told them she was pregnant again.

  When Jean was in the hospital for the third child, Forrest and his crew worked late into each night to finish the new house and move everything in. William Treadway Holly, skinnier than Forrie had been, and quieter than Faith, came home to the new adobe. “He’s purple,” Forrie said the first thing. At three years and fo
ur months, Forrie had just learned his colors from Franny. Faith was 17 months and feeding herself—halleluiah—but still too young to help. The feeding battles began again. With Billy so scrawny, Jean knew she had to be victorious. He didn’t fuss or cry or even spit. He just turned his head away. She couldn’t find him, but imagined his skinny purple arms and legs backing away, his wrinkled face retreating from the loaded spoon.

  Days were triply tiring with three to keep track of. Faith was at the bells-on-shoes stage and Forrie’s radius of operation was widening day by day. Jean had to get used to not quite knowing where each one was every moment, even with Celerina’s help.

  One day Celerina’s husband, Ezequiel, approached Jean at the clothesline. “Señora, Celerina work only eight hours a day.” She didn’t know if that was a request or a statement of fact about some new regime. It turned out to be a statement of fact. Celerina began to come and leave according to her own clock, whose hours, Jean thought, must be shorter than the rest of the world’s. Jean adjusted, fuming at first when Celerina left in the middle of feeding. But she didn’t want to lose Celerina altogether. Her crooning to the baby soothed everyone. “Callate niño, duermete niño,” she’d half sing, half say, when it was time for afternoon naps. “Que tengo que hacer—lavar los panales y ponerme a coser.” By the time Celerina finished, Billy would be asleep, Faith would be calmed, and Jean could breathe normally for a few moments before she’d have to find Forrie.

  It seemed like she was always looking for him. Once she couldn’t find him for a couple of hours. She walked through each room of the new house, called him, stood still to listen for any movement, heard none and went on. Was this a game, his new way to taunt her? The thought stirred ugly memories of the fly episode. She walked outside onto the patio. “Forrie?” No answer. She went to the garage across the gravel breezeway and called louder. No response. She didn’t know whether to be angry or alarmed. Neither felt very good. She called Mother Holly. He wasn’t there. She called Lance and Mary Kay. They hadn’t seen him. She called Franny Nelson. Not there either, but neither was Franny’s daughter, Judy.

  Franny came over and looked, too. “Well, you haven’t missed him in any of the usual places,” Franny said. Then she checked the barn and corral, the brickyard, the pepper trees along the dirt road, the swings under the Chinese elm. She went into the old wooden house, empty and waiting to be moved off the property. The two children, barefoot, wearing sunglasses and talking gaily, sat on blankets and held open umbrellas.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  “Playing beach,” Forrie said, and giggled. Franny corralled them back into the house.

  “From now on, Forrest Holly, you’re going to tell me where you’re going when you leave this house,” Jean announced.

  “Do you actually think he will?” Franny asked when they went into the kitchen.

  “No. But maybe he will sometimes.” She tried not to think of the potential disasters that lay in wait for unaccompanied little boys on a ranch—a fall from a tree or barn loft, an angry horse, even a rattlesnake. “I can’t keep him within reach or even within hearing range. You can’t do that to a little kid. I have to trust.”

  “Last week when you couldn’t find him when Marge Baker brought her girl to piano lesson, she must have been shocked,” Franny said.

  “Why? How do you know?”

  “She talked about it and it got back to me.” Franny’s voice was apologetic.

  A fly buzzed close to Jean’s face, hovering near her temple. She scowled and waved it off fiercely. “They just have to find something to occupy their minds in this forsaken town.”

  Meanwhile she had dishes to do. She always had dishes to do. Willard Butters’ boy made more frequent deliveries. Trailings of jam left by Forrie on the sink drew ants, marching with undisturbed freedom through breakfast, sometimes through lunch, until spotted by Celerina—if she was there. If not, Mother Holly found them. Faith cried out for attention. As if aware of the chaos he was born into, Billy retreated into the shadows. In cluttered mornings his quietness made him disappear. He seemed to wait to be noticed; sometimes he wasn’t.

  Jean stumbled over toys left in odd places where small hands had dropped them. She discovered a truck in the toilet when she went to clean it one day. Another day it was a child’s wooden block, swollen with water and stuck in the same toilet. Forrest tried to get it out with a brace and bit. Finally Ed had to remove the whole toilet.

  Laundry stacked up. Diapers stacked up. Training pants stacked up. Sheets stacked up.

  Jean walked outside to the clothesline one day, her loaded basket in front of her. Celerina was gone again and had been for several days. Someone banged on the piano. The noise didn’t bother her though she realized it would probably drive others crazy. To her it meant life, activity, family. It meant that Faith must be up from her nap. Billy would probably be next. Forrie was somewhere. Outside, maybe. More often now, he’d tell her where he was going when he went out, but often things distracted him and he’d wander off. He could be anywhere—and Ramona would be sure to notice. She could hear their criticism even though Franny tried to act as a buffer. Neglectful mother, neglectful mother—the dreaded accusation pounded in her head. She raised her hand above her head to find the clothesline. “There ought to be a law against people like that having babies.” She could imagine them saying it. People like what? she thought. People who, after years of being afraid they’d always be alone, love their children all the more? People who feed and bathe and clothe and teach them with more intensity and concentration than others could ever imagine?

  She shoved the laundry basket along the packed dirt with her foot, pulled out a sheet and searched for the corners. Just let them try to do what I’m doing. She stretched it up to the clothesline with one hand, reached for a clothespin with the other. The damp sheet slipped and fell to the dirt. “Dammit.” She bent down.

  A soft scraping sound came from behind and to the left.

  “Forrie?”

  “Yeah.”

  She winced, involuntarily raising her shoulders. He must have heard her. “That wasn’t a nice thing for me to say. I shouldn’t have said it,” she snapped. She heard him scraping again. “What are you doing?”

  “Digging.”

  “Making a hole? It’s not a safe place for holes, not here near the clothesline.” She could twist her ankle in one. She’d done it before.

  “No. I’m just scraping. I need some dirt.”

  “What for?”

  “Pop said I could build a dam near the pepper tree.”

  They were so important to him, his dams and moats and forts. The precious urgency of Forrie’s make-believe world touched her and dissolved her annoyance. In such moments she felt included in a universe of trucks and caves and tunnels, the fluid world of a normal boy at play.

  “A flood’s coming so I got to build it fast.”

  “Really?”

  “Aw, Mom, you know what I mean.”

  She knew he didn’t want to admit it was only play. In his earnest absorption, he had unconsciously granted her a disclosure of the workings of his imagination. One comment by Forrie could lift her out of tiredness into the realm of fantasy where dams are always built in time to hold back the flood and caves invariably lead to adventure.

  But for the most part, she was tired, too tired to do her own playing, too interrupted to read or play piano, too distracted to invite the women for bridge, too weary to make love or even concentrate on moving. When she was tired, she was less alert and she didn’t sense doors left open in her path. And now there were more little people around to leave cupboard doors ajar. She wore a constantly changing pattern of bruises and scrapes.

  Forrest probably did, too. She only guessed that. They never spoke of those things. Their evening talks out at the swings after the children were asleep did not consist of bashes and dropped sheets. Only when blindness led them into humor was it ever alluded to.

  “Poor, dumb old Mort
,” Forrest told her one night, referring to his new horse. “What a numbskull. He’s as slow as a slug.”

  “Is that why you named him after Father?”

  “No. But it sure takes him just as long to catch on. Today I rode out past Lance’s, between the fields out to the oak trees. Thought I knew where I was going—done it a hundred times, but somehow I went further east than I meant to and ended up tangled in someone’s clothesline.”

  “Whose?” Jean stood behind him as he sat on the swing, her fingers trailing through his cropped hair.

  “The Bradley’s. I felt brassieres and panties flapping in my face. Big ones. I never knew she was so hefty.” They both laughed. “Had to wait there with Mort twitching under me like a nervous kid seeing a naked woman for the first time. Finally Mrs. Bradley came out to set me right.”

  “Maybe Lance was right about Mort.” She traced the outline of his ear with her fingertips and giggled. “Maybe you paid too much for him.” She kissed him on the ear. She knew such episodes amused him, threw fuel onto his fire of life.

  “Today in the brickyard some fella bought an order for a whole house,” he said. “He asked me if I knew someone who could build it for him.”

  “Who did you tell him?”

  “I told him I would.”

  She nearly choked. “But you don’t know anything about building a house.”

  “I can ask questions, can’t I? And Ed and the men can do the work, and I can do the planning and ordering materials and supervising. Ed’s due to get his contractor’s license next month. It’ll make more money than brickmaking and hauling.”

  She thought he had the nerve of the ages, but she didn’t want to darken his hopes. He’d probably learned a lot from the crews building this house—he was always asking them questions—and he had built a garage for Mother Holly. Let him. That was his arena. Hers was children.

  And soon there would be another. By the time Billy was potty trained, she was pregnant again. She couldn’t contain what she had to recognize as despair. Alone during the children’s afternoon naps, she collapsed on the sofa. How was she going to tell Mother? There had been a note of disapproval in Mother’s voice when she had told her of Billy, even her own mother implying that full blown motherhood would be too much for her. Now she had a couple more years of diapers and the nightmare of feeding all over again.