Fields Of Gold

by Marie Bostwick

  Yet there was always a part of me that kept waiting and wondering why he never came back. My thoughts spiraled and chased each other like a dog trying to gnaw on its own tail. He hadn’t been able to find the time to come. Maybe he didn’t want to come. Maybe he was afraid I’d demand an explanation. Maybe he’d just forgotten, as simple as that. No, I wouldn’t let myself think that. Much easier to never see or talk with him again than to think I’d been a ... a what? Mama would have said conquest, but that wasn’t what bothered me. That was all tied up with pride and image. I just couldn’t bear to think that I was nothing to him. It was all right with me, not to be everything to him, but to be nothing would be more than I could bear. That’s why I hadn’t gone to Oklahoma City. Not to protect him, though that was partly it, but more to protect myself. “What a coward you are, Evangeline Glennon,” I said to the empty evening air. “What a chicken-hearted coward.”

  “Well, now, I don’t know about that,” a voice rumbled in through the darkness. “I’ve thought of you a lot. A lot. I’ve remembered you and described you to myself with so many phrases it got to be like reciting poetry by heart, but never once in all that pretty prose did the word coward come to mind.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment before I turned, just to measure the weight of the words, see if the sound was real or imaginary. When I opened them, there he was, standing tall and lean and so alive that I realized how small and flat my memory was. “Hello, Evangeline,” he said softly.

  “Hello.” I paused awkwardly, trying to think what I should say after so long. Nothing came to mind. “I ... I didn’t hear a plane. Didn’t see it.”

  “Didn’t want you to. Didn’t want anyone to know I was here. That’s why I waited until it was dark. Where are your folks?”

  “Gone. They’ll be back in a couple of days.” A hint of a smile played on his lips, and I could see in his eyes it was the answer he’d been hoping for. Embarrassed and elated at once, I couldn’t look him straight in the eye, but focused on his hands, lean and strong and tan. I wanted to reach out and hold them in mine, but I couldn’t bring myself to be so bold. “I didn’t know you were coming. I mean, how—”

  He brushed aside clumsy small talk. “Come here.” His voice was deeper and more certain than that of the boy I’d known five years before, but it was still his. I could have picked it out in a crowd of one hundred people all talking at once.

  Somehow I stood up and crossed the porch to meet him. Perhaps I even said something more, but I don’t remember any of that. I just remember the deep, warm solace of his arms and how right and complete it felt to be there, how simple and authentic. When we walked together to my room there was no need to ask why or if we should. We already knew everything that mattered, that we could not have gone on one more minute without each other. We came together more instinctively, more urgently than the first time, so long before. We breathed each other in like oxygen, as though our survival depended upon it. We’d have crawled inside each other and stayed cocooned there, safe and complete until we became something whole and new, until the danger had passed and the strangers moved on, if only we could have managed it.

  I couldn’t sleep after, just lay awake and watched him, wanting to sculpt and chisel him perfectly in my mind in dimensions that had shape and depth and wouldn’t erode when morning came. He slept and woke and slept again, keeping me close through the whole night, so that if I stirred even an inch he reached out and gathered me back in close. My whole body ached for him, though we were already as near as breathing. I surprised myself by reaching for him. When we came together again it was sweet and slow and peaceful, as though our lives together lay stretched out before us far, far into the distance and there was no need to hurry. I found myself stirred in a new way, electric and deep and wide, so surprising that I wanted to turn my mind to examine it, but I had no strength left to think, the tide of need pulled me along so completely. Before it was over I cried out with Slim, as he alone had before, and we collapsed and held each other tight, exhausted and gasping like slippery newborns. We slept, nested together, close as felt-wrapped silver spoons, waiting in a dark, musty drawer, hidden away for safekeeping.

  I had never been that happy before. So brief.

  In the morning we got up together and smiled natural sunrise smiles at each other like an old married couple, pleased to see each other, the way I’d seen Mama and Papa do. We talked quietly about small things at first, family and crops and gossip, testing the water and exercising our voices and nerve for the bigger questions that waited to be voiced. The morning was too fine and we felt too good to risk conversations with unpredictable outcomes just then. Better to pretend for a few minutes, play house, and imagine our lives as they might have been, dull and ordinary and complete as anyone else’s.

  I fixed eggs and ham and hotcakes and coffee, and he ate as though he hadn’t had a meal in a long, long time. He sighed and patted his stomach contentedly after he’d scraped his plate clean the second time. “I was right. I knew you’d be a good cook. Too good. I’m stuffed.” With a groan, he got up from his chair and stretched his arms up high, nearly brushing the ceiling with his fists. Then he smiled and glanced around the kitchen as though looking for someone. “So, where did your folks go off to? I’d hoped to find you alone, but I can’t believe I was lucky enough to get you to myself for two whole days.”

  “They drove to Oklahoma City. To see you.”

  He laughed, and I treasured the sound of it. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh out loud, bright and strong like thick brass bells. “Well, isn’t that something! I never thought about that. Here I thought I’d sketched out every detail so nothing could go wrong, but I never figured I might miss you because you’d gone to see me.” His voice softened, and he touched my cheek with an outstretched fingertip. “Good thing you didn’t go too. If I’d shown up and you hadn’t been here I think I’d have lost my mind.” He reached over and pulled me onto his lap, and we kissed for a long moment, a maple sweet breakfast kiss. Then he grasped both my shoulders, pushed me to arm’s length, and examined me sternly, “Hey, how come you didn’t go?” he teased. “Don’t you like me anymore?”

  “Somebody had to stay here and feed the stock and watch the place,” I said, shrugging.

  “A practical answer,” he agreed. “Thank heaven you’re so practical, Evangeline. It would have broken my heart to fly all this way and not find you home. If you only knew.” He sighed a tired sigh, like an old man, and rested with his arms about me, content to let it go for now. There was more to the story, I could tell, but he didn’t trust himself to give it out all at once. It would come in small pieces, secrets he could share only with me, but not right away. The years apart had taught us both how precious a few moments of pure happiness could be; he didn’t want to contaminate them with painful memories. I understood completely. I had secrets of my own to tell, but they would wait. He squeezed me tight and kissed me again.

  “It’s taken me months to work out how to disappear for twenty-four hours and not have a pack of reporters chase after me. I was supposed to have an unpublicized stop in Kansas last night, but I flew in the dark so no one’d see me and landed in your father’s field. I covered the Spirit with canvas and hay. Looks just like a haystack. They’ll be worried that I didn’t show up, but it would take them days to figure out where I’d gone. When I arrive in Oklahoma City right on schedule tomorrow morning, I’ll tell ’em I had engine trouble and no one will be the wiser. Simple as that.”

  “Good plan,” I agreed and laid my head on his shoulder.

  He twined his fingers in my hair. “Oh, Evangeline. I’ve missed you. You have no idea how much. If I could sit in this chair and keep this moment, just like this for another day, a week, a month, it would be enough. I’d die happy. Look at me,” he said ruefully. “On the front page of every paper. I’ve got money, fame, and all that comes with it, but what I’d like most is to freeze this moment and keep it forever. Sitting in a chair in Oklahoma
with you on my lap and the sun outside, that would be enough. Nobody’d believe it.”

  “I would,” I murmured and rubbed my cheek on his shoulder. “It is enough, just for this moment. But then the moment passes and something catches your sight, just out of the corner of your eye, and you have to get up and see what it is. Then you’re gone.” I hadn’t meant it to sound like a rebuke, but even listening to myself I knew it was there. The moment had passed. Pretending was over; it was time for explanations and truth.

  “Evangeline, I’m sorry I didn’t come back before. I don’t know exactly why I didn’t. As much as I love you, as much as I dreamed about you day and night, I just had to keep flying. I couldn’t have supported you,” he spoke evenly, as though his absence had everything to do with rationality. “Even if I could, you wouldn’t have had the attention you deserve, and the real truth is, I just wasn’t ready. Flying took everything that was in me. I couldn’t afford any distractions.” He was silent for a moment, and it seemed like that last phrase echoed around the room. Then he spoke more softly, almost pleadingly. “Do you understand?”

  “It’s all right now.” I slid off his lap and knelt in front of him, so he’d know whatever things he’d done were loosed. I wasn’t a fool about this. I didn’t believe his reasons were as simple as he made them sound, but I knew he believed them, so there was no point in pushing him. The world was so demanding of him, I wanted there to be one place that was easy, where his words were taken at face value. That is my understanding of love. I comforted and released him like I did Morgan when he felt guilty over something he’d broken. “I always understood. You don’t need to say more.”

  “Yes I do,” he protested. “After Paris, I wanted to come right away, but I couldn’t. I had to keep you from them. They’d have turned our lives into a sideshow. You have no idea what it’s like. Never a moment to myself. They tear at me like dogs at a piece of beef. It’s the loneliest feeling in the world, standing pressed on all sides by a throng of strangers. None of them knows me, but they all want a piece of me. All of them want something, like I’m supposed to touch them or say something and that will make everything all right.” His forehead furrowed in deep lines of concentration, as though still trying to puzzle out just what was expected of him. “I can’t stand it alone anymore, not one more second, so I came as soon as I could.”

  My heart broke for him. I had known, even before he did, how it would be and how he would hate it. There was no way I could have helped him, no way in the world, and yet I was overcome by feelings of having failed him terribly.

  He took both my hands in his and looked me with a mixture of relief and longing. “But it’s all right now. I’m here, and everything is going to be better, for both of us. Evangeline, please marry me. I need someone that understands me. Someone I can be myself with. I need you. I can’t stand it alone anymore, not for one more day.”

  In my mind, over the long years, I’d imagined him saying just those words, just that way a hundred times, but in my dreams everything had been so much easier. I wanted to say yes. It should have been so simple and made us so happy, but it wasn’t. Nothing about Slim was simple. An image flickered across my mind, the one I’d seen in the newsreel where he was standing in the throng of people, his lips stretched tight and unnaturally across his teeth while flashbulbs popped in his face and strangers grabbed his hands. If it was only Slim and me in the picture, I’d say yes first and tell him about Morgan after, and we’d work it all out later. We’d move away and start over where no one knew us. But it wasn’t that easy.

  There was no way to erase the slate and start over now. He wasn’t Slim anymore, he was Charles Augustus Lindbergh, national hero, household word. National heroes marry prom princesses with rows of straight white teeth and clean-smelling hair. They don’t stop over in fields in the middle of nowhere and leave pregnant girls behind and five years later parade them in front of the flashbulbs with bastard sons in tow, not if they want to stay heroes, they don’t. I feared that as much as Slim hated the press, the lights, the crowds, he needed them, too. There was no way to know for sure but to tell him. What happened after would be up to him.

  I took a deep breath. “Slim, I had a baby.”

  His eyebrows jumped in surprise and then lowered slightly as the meaning of those words sunk in, understanding what I was saying, but hoping he’d heard me wrong. “You mean”—he hesitated, searching for a delicate way to ask the question—“you met someone. . . or do you mean, after I left ...”

  “We had a baby,” I said, an edge of irritation in my voice. “A little boy. I named him Morgan. He’s four years old. Nobody knows he’s yours but me and my folks, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  His face was blank with shock, and he buried his head in his hands for a moment. For once, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I shouldn’t have spoken to him so harshly, but I was angry with him. It was too much to expect that he’d be overjoyed by the news, especially when I’d laid it out so suddenly, I knew. Still, it made me mad to think that even though by a measure of time we were practically strangers, I knew him inside out while he seemed to know me scarcely at all. How he could possibly think, even for an instant, that there was someone else?

  When I was a little girl, I used to read the Bible, and when it talked about two people getting together it always said “and so and so went into so and so and he knew her.” He knew her! I’d always thought that was so beautiful; that was love to me, and when I grew up it all came true. I saw Slim, and he became a part of me, waking and sleeping. The thought that he hardly recognized me stung like a slap on the face. For a moment I just wished he would leave, though even in my anger, I knew I could never push him away. A mile away or ten thousand miles away, I’d given up a place in my soul to him, and it couldn’t be taken back.

  He lifted his face to mine. Regret was written on every inch of it.

  “Oh, Evangeline! God, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry. What you must have been through, and all alone. I should have come back right away.” He berated himself, rubbing his brow hard with his fist like trying to scrub away a stain. “If I’d only known then, we could have gotten married before I’d flown to Paris. Before the press ...” his voice trailed off in regret. “I should have known.”

  He was speaking of our life together in the past tense, a path we’d missed. Something hopeful in me sank. That was that. There would be no more talk of marriage. Hadn’t I always known that? I’d sent him away in the first place. There were a dozen good reasons I should have been furious with him, thrown him out of my life forever, but I looked in his eyes and I saw love, so I couldn’t speak of what should be. His love was different from mine, I realized. His love left room for others, other people, other things, for himself. It was all he had to offer me, and it was that hook I’d hung my life on. I’d either have to accept it for what it was or go without. I couldn’t go without. I loved him. Why did I feel so numb inside?

  I reached out to him and breathed forgiveness on him like a cloud of incense. He was so tender, so human and imperfect, and that was part of what I loved about him—this flawed, anxious part of him, searching for the right thing, that was the side only I got to see, and I cherished it. The world didn’t know him, but they expected perfection of him. For a moment, I had been expecting it too, just as grasping and selfish as the crowds in the newsreel. I couldn’t stay angry with him.

  “Don’t do that, Slim. Don’t punish yourself for what you should have done.” I reached out and stroked his hair. It was unruly and full of waves, just like Morgan’s. “There’s plenty of guilt to go around on that score. If we talk about what we should have done, we could say that we should never have made love. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone flying, or shared our dreams, or even looked at each other. Maybe we shouldn’t have, but I wouldn’t take back anything.” I pulled his hands away from his face, placed my palms flat against his, and leaned in to kiss him. He pulled me closer and responded deeply and gently, making an apo
logy with his kiss for all that he’d missed and all the things he couldn’t be.

  Then he said the words that seemed to heal everything, that made me believe we’d always be one, though only in secret.

  “Tell me about Morgan,” he whispered into the tangle of my hair. “Tell me everything about our son.”

  The dusky afternoon cast long shadows through the front-room windows. We sat on the sofa, his arm draped over my shoulders while I showed him the small stack of photos taken with the camera Papa had bought when Morgan was born, a black-and-white biography. Baby, toddler, little boy. Morgan’s eyes were hopeful and bright, always looking forward. We lingered over the most recent snapshot, one of Morgan sitting on Ranger’s back, beaming from ear to ear and leaning down to wrap his arms around the horse’s dusty mane.

  “This one was at Fourth of July,” I narrated. “See there? He’s got a little flag stuck in his back pocket. He ran around all day waving that flag. He and Papa set off a million firecrackers and made a terrible racket. The cow wouldn’t milk for three days after.”

  Slim laughed. “Wasn’t he afraid of the noise?”

  “No, Morgan’s fearless,” I reported with pride. “More than he ought to be. I have to keep an eye on him every minute. One day I caught him piling up crates so he could climb up on the ridgepole of the tool shed. He had two big elm branches with him and he said he was going to strap them to his arms for wings so he could fly.”

  Slim grinned. “Chip off the old block.”

  “I’d say.” We sat together a moment longer, admiring our son. “Here. Keep this one.” I pressed the picture into his hands.