He nodded absently. He had no earthly understanding of what it would feel like, Lusa realized, to be anything but completely surrounded and smothered by family.
They heard the bobwhite again, declaring his name from the hillside. Lusa heard it not so much as “Bob White” but more like a confident “All right,” with a rising inflection at the end, as if this were just the beginning of a long sentence he meant to say. She loved that he was there on her fallow pasture: he was not himself her property but rather a sort of tenant, depending on her for continued goodwill. In all her troubles she had never yet stopped to consider her new position: landholder. Not just a mortage holder, not just burdened, but also blessed with a piece of the world’s trust. The condition forbidden to her zayda’s people for more than a thousand years.
After a decent interval, long enough to permit a change of subject, Rickie asked, “You’re not worried about that coyote?”
“Am I?” She drank half her glass of tea before answering. “You’ll just think this is crazy, but no, I’m not. I mean maybe, at the worst, it could get one kid, and that wouldn’t break me. I can’t see killing a thing that beautiful just on suspicion. I’ll go with innocent until proven guilty.”
“You may change your tune when you see it running off into the woods with that poor little kid squalling bloody murder.”
Lusa smiled, struck by his language. “Listen, can I tell you a story? In Palestine, where my people came from, about a million years ago, they had this tradition of sacrificing goats. To God, theoretically, but I think probably they ate them after the ceremony.” She set her glass down, twisting it into the grass. “So, here’s the thing. They’d always let one goat escape and run off into the desert. The scapegoat. It was supposed to be carrying off all their sins and mistakes from that year.”
Rickie looked amused. “And the moral of the story is what?”
She laughed. “I’m not sure. What do you think?”
“It’s OK to let one get away?”
“Yeah, something like that. I’m not such a perfect farmer that I can kill a coyote for the one kid it might take from me. There are ten other ways I could lose a goat through my own stupidity. And I’m not about to kill myself. So. Does that make sense?”
He nodded thoughtfully. “If you say it does, I reckon it does.” He went quiet, smiling to himself, admiring something off in the distance behind her back. Lusa hoped it was the butterflies in her weed patch down below the yard, though she knew enough of young men’s minds to know that wasn’t likely. She bent her knees, took hold of her clammy feet, and pulled off her shoes, realizing suddenly that wet sneakers were a wretched proposition. That would explain his sneakers on top of his truck.
“You’ve got pretty feet,” he observed.
She stretched her legs out straight again and looked at her water-wrinkled toes, then up at him. “Oh, boy. You should get out more.”
He laughed. “Yeah, well. I have a confession to make. I think you look pretty sitting on the rear end of a goat, too. I’ve had the biggest crush on you all summer.”
Lusa bit her lips to keep from smiling. “I kind of gathered that.”
“I know. You think it’s stupid.”
“What’s stupid?”
He reached over and brushed the damp hair out of her eyes, softly grazing the side of her face with his knuckles. “This. Me thinking about you this way. You don’t know how much I think about it, either.”
“I think I may,” she said. “It’s not stupid. It scares me, though.”
He kept his hand against the side of her neck and said quietly, “I wouldn’t hurt you for anything,” and Lusa was terrified, feeling suddenly every nerve ending in her breasts and her lips. It would be so easy to invite him into the house, upstairs, to the huge, soft bed in which his grandparents had probably conceived his mother. How comforting it would be to be taken away from her solitary self and held against his solid, lovely body. His hands would become Cole’s. Just for an hour the starvation that dogged her through every night and day could feast on real sensation instead of memory. Real taste, real touch, the pressure of skin on nipple and tongue. She shivered.
“I can’t even talk about this.”
“Why not?” he asked, dropping his hand to her knees. He ran his fingers down the inseam of her wet jeans from knee to hem, then clasped his whole hand gently around her bare ankle. She remembered, with acute pain, the sense of small, compact perfection she’d known inside her husband’s large-limbed embrace. She looked at his hand on her ankle, then back at his face, trying to forge pain into anger.
“Do I really have to tell you why not?”
He held her eye. “Tell me you don’t want me to make love to you.”
“God,” she gasped, turning her head to the side with her speechless mouth open wide, scarcely able to breathe. Where had he learned to talk like that, the movies? She shook her head slowly from side to side, unable to keep her open mouth from smiling because of his face, his earnest determination to have her. She remembered how that felt, obsessive desire. Oh, God, those days in her Euclid apartment. There was no engine on earth whose power compared with the want of one body for another.
“That’s not a fair question,” she said finally. “I would want you to, yes, if that were possible. I think I’d like it a lot. That’s the truth, may lightning strike me dead, but now you know. Does it make anything better?”
“To me it does. Damn!” He grinned a crooked smile she’d never seen except on the face of Cole Widener, in bed. “To me it’s sweet. It’s like getting an A on a test.”
She took his hand from her ankle, kissed his knuckles briskly like a mother repairing a child’s hurt, then let the hand drop into the grass. “OK, good. You made the grade. Can we move on to another subject now?”
“Like what? Like throwing a mattress in the back of my truck and heading for the river tonight?”
“You’re incorrigible.”
“Which means what, exactly?”
“Which means you’re seventeen going on eighteen and you’ve got hormones between your ears.”
“I might be that,” he said. “I might be a lot of fun, too. You’ll never know till you try.”
She sat with her arms tightly crossed, wishing she had bothered to change her clothes. “Drowned rat” was not the impression she was making in this wet shirt, evidently. He would be so appreciative, she thought miserably. It would be so easy to startle him with pleasures he’d remember for the rest of his life. But then again, maybe not, if he’d already set his standards by the magazines under his bed. Boys never knew what they lost on those magazine girlfriends.
“I’ll never know, then,” she said, feeling a change in herself, a permanent shift onto safer ground. “I’m not denying it would be fun, maybe even more than fun. But it’s completely out of the question, and if it comes up again I’ll have to stop being your friend. I’m sorry I confessed I was attracted to you. You should just try to forget that.”
He looked at her with a neutral expression and nodded slowly. “Right,” he said. “Fat chance.”
“Look. Don’t take this the wrong way, Rickie, I like you for you, but also sometimes you remind me of Cole in ways that make me lose my bearings. But you’re not Cole. You’re my nephew. We’re relatives.”
“We’re not blood kin,” he argued.
“But we’re family, and you know it. And, you’re a minor. Just technically, for another few months maybe, but you are. I’m pretty sure what you’re proposing would be a crime. Committed by me, against you. If they have capital punishment in this state, your mother and your aunts would probably see that I got the chair.”
He closed his eyes and said nothing. He seemed chastened, finally, by all of it: her tone, her words, the truth. Lusa felt both relieved and sad.
“I’m sorry to be so blunt,” she said. “I don’t think of you as a child. You know that, right? If we were both two years older and you were somebody I’d just met, I’d probably g
o out with you.”
He lit another cigarette and gave his full attention to the business of smoking and staring off into the distance. At length he said, “I’ll be sure to remind you of that two years from now when you’re burning heavy with some guy around here.”
Lusa worked a small stone out of the ground and tossed it past her feet. “I can’t even picture that, you know? From where I stand, it looks like a real dry county.”
“Well, you’re not the Lone Ranger. All the girls at my school are hot to get pregnant and married so they can play house, but they seem like little girls. After I graduate I want to do something, like hitchhike to Florida and get a job on a fishing boat or something, you know? See what those palm-tree islands look like. And these girls with their big hair are all down at Kmart looking at the baby shoes going, ‘Aren’t these cute?’ They’re like cheerleaders for boringness.”
Lusa laughed. “And you and me, we’re different, right? Two noble souls cast together in dubious circumstances till we can find somebody halfway appropriate to go out with.”
He nodded, grinning that damned lopsided grin. “That sounds about right.”
“Frankly, your prospects are better than mine. By the time my goats up here drop their kids, I predict you’ll have met the girl of your dreams, and I’ll be toast.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
“I’ll dance at your wedding, Rick. I’m betting on it.”
“I didn’t get to dance at yours,” he said. “You didn’t invite me.”
“Next time I will,” she said. “I promise. That was a big mistake, you know? Don’t ever elope. The relatives never forgive you.”
“Relatives,” he agreed. “What a pain.”
“Thank you.” She looked at him then, hit by a sudden inspiration. “You know what we need to do, you and me? We need to go dancing. Do you like to dance?”
He nodded. “Yeah. As a matter of fact, I do.”
“That’s exactly what we need to do. Is there someplace around here where they have music on a Saturday night?”
“Oh, sure, there’s the college bar over in Franklin, Skid Row. Or we could drive over to Leesport. Cotton-Eye Joe’s, they get good country bands in there.” He was taking this proposal seriously.
“Do you think we’d scandalize the family if we went out dancing?”
“Oh yeah. My mom and aunts think dancing’s basically just the warm-up act. Aunt Mary Edna gives this lecture in Sunday school about how dancing always leads to sexual intercourse.”
“Well, she’s right, that’s probably true for most animals. Insects do that, birds do, even some mammals. But we’ve got great big brains, you and me. I think we could distinguish a courtship ritual from the act itself. Don’t you?”
Rickie fell backward on the ground and lay there for some time with his cigarette sticking up like a chimney. Eventually he removed it so he could speak. “You know what drives me crazy about you, Lusa? Half the time I don’t know what in the hell you’re discussing.”
She looked down at him, her beautiful nephew in the grass. “Drives you crazy and that’s a bad thing? Or a good thing?”
He thought about it. “It doesn’t have to be good or bad. It’s just you. My favorite aunt, Miss Lusa Landowski.”
“Wow. You actually know my name. And here I am just about to change it.”
“Yeah? To what?”
“Widener.”
Rickie raised his dark eyebrows and looked at her from his prone position. “Really. What for?”
“For Cole, the kids, all of you. The family. I don’t know.” She shrugged, feeling a little embarrassed. “It just seems like the thing to do. So this farm will stay where it is on our little map of the world. It’s an animal thing, I guess. Marking a territory.”
“Huh,” he said.
“So, let’s go dancing, OK? Absolutely no funny business, we’ll just dance till we drop, shake hands, and say good night. I need the exercise. You free this Saturday?”
“I am free as a bird this Saturday,” he said, still flat on his back, smiling grandly at the sky.
“Good. Because you know, I’m going to be a mother pretty soon. I’d better get out and paint the town red a time or two while I’ve still got the chance.”
Rickie sat up and stubbed out his cigarette pensively in the grass. “That’s really nice that you’re taking those kids. I mean, nice, hell—it’s more than that.”
Lusa shrugged. “I’m doing it for me as much as for them.”
“Well, my mom and Aunt Mary Edna think it’s like this gift from God, that you’re doing it. They said you’re a saint.”
“Oh, come on.”
“No, I swear to God that’s what they said. I heard ’em say it.”
“Wow,” she said. “What a trip. From devil-worshiper to saint in one short summer.”
{28}
Old Chestnuts
This world was full of perils, thought Garnett, and Nannie Rawley was as trusting as a child. She didn’t even realize this man was up to no good. Hanging on to her like a cocklebur, but fifty times more dangerous. Garnett had heard of things as strange as a younger man’s buttering up some pitiful, sweet old woman and marrying her for her money. Now, on that score Nannie was safe, because she probably didn’t have two dimes to rub together until harvest season was done and her crop sold, but she did have the best-producing orchard in five counties, and no living descendants, and everybody around here knew it. There was no telling what this sneaky snake had on his mind.
Garnett couldn’t swear he knew, either, but he knew this much: for two days now, every time he’d happened to catch a glimpse of Nannie out in her garden, there he’d been, leaning on the fence. He hadn’t even lifted a finger to help her carry her bushel baskets of squash and corn into the house. If that fellow set foot inside her house, Garnett was prepared to call up Timmy Boyer on the telephone and get him over here. He would have to. She didn’t know enough to protect herself.
He finished folding the shirts he’d washed yesterday in the washing machine and dried in the dryer. He held the last one up by the peaks of its shoulders and stared at it. It looked as wrinkled and worn as he felt himself. Ellen had had some way of getting them to come out nice and smooth, even without the ironing board. On cool winter mornings before he went to school she’d hand him a shirt to put on that felt as warm as a wife’s embrace, and he’d carry that little extra measure of affection on his shoulders all day long. No matter what affronts of youthful insolence he had to face in his day, he’d still have that: he was a man taken care of by a woman.
He piled the folded shirts into a stack as neatly as he could, put the balled-together socks on top, and carried the whole thing upstairs. He paused by the window at the landing, balancing the folded clothes on one hand and drawing the sheer curtain aside with the other.
Almighty stars, there he still was, like a wolf waiting for the lamb. She was not even anywhere in sight. What kind of nerve would it take to just stand there waiting for her like that, with his elbows up on the fence? Garnett squinted hard, trying to bring the details of the man’s appearance into focus. By gosh, he wasn’t even that good-looking. On the portly side, if the truth be told. Portly, going to lumpy. Garnett felt so irritated he dropped a pair of socks. Never mind, he’d pick them up later. He peered as far as he could into the shadows of Nannie’s backyard, but she didn’t seem to be around there, either.
Well, then, he thought suddenly, wildly—this was his chance. He could go over there this minute and give that fellow his walking papers. That garden fence was not ten feet from Garnett’s line, and he had as much right as anybody to chase off no-goods and vagrants from the neighborhood.
Garnett went on up to the bedroom first, to put his shirts in the bureau drawer. Yes, by gosh, he thought, he was going to do it. He briefly considered fetching his shotgun but then decided against it. He hadn’t fired a gun in many a year, since the days when he could claim a better eye and a steadier hand, though he was su
re he could still shoot in a pinch, if he had to. The thought gave him courage. Maybe just holding the shotgun would steady him. He wouldn’t load it; there wasn’t any need. He would just carry it out there with him, to give him the air of a man who meant business.
He walked around to the closet on Ellen’s side of the bed, where he tended to keep things he never planned on needing again. The door had gone off its frame a little and scraped the floor as he dragged it open. He batted at the darkness like a blind man, trying to find the pull string to switch the light on, and nearly jumped out of his shirt when something big plummeted down off the shelf, bouncing off his shoulder as it fell. Ellen’s old round hatbox. It landed on its side, and out rolled Ellen’s navy-blue church hat on its brim, describing a small half-circle on the floor before sitting down flat beside the bed.
“Ellen,” he said aloud, staring at the hat.
The hat, of course, made no reply. It merely sat there, flat on its proper little brim, adorned with its little bunch of artificial cherries. If it could have folded its hands in its lap, it would have.
“Well, don’t scare me like that, woman. I’m doing the best I can.”
He grabbed his shotgun with both hands and hurried out of the bedroom, reaching around behind him to pull the door shut. She didn’t need to see this.
“Man, state your business,” Garnett called out from the clump of wild cherries in the fencerow, a hundred feet from where the fellow still stood. He gave no sign of having seen or heard Garnett—ha!—who still had it in him to be stealthy as a good deer hunter. The thought gave him some satisfaction, and perhaps a little daring.
He cleared his throat, since his last words had come out sounding a little wobbly, and called out again. “Hello there!”
Nothing.
“I said, hello. I’m Garnett Walker, I own this land here, and I’d like to know your business, if you don’t mind.”
The man didn’t speak, did not so much as turn his head. Garnett had never seen such a display of rudeness. Even the boy who drove the UPS truck would nod a reluctant hello when pressed.
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