She went out of the kitchen and through the Living room, where the oil heater cast an orange oval onto the linoleum, through the sliding doors into their bedroom, and sat on the bed. Across the room, in the vanity mirror, she could make out her reflection in the near dark, dim and featureless, a bluish form, and it was as if she were seeing through her face to another time. There was a grass-covered plain with nothing on it but a dark shape off in the distance, breaking the line of the horizon high up and thin. The grass was thick and lush green and was swaying and windswept by currents of the universe or a world of different times than this, and then it moved off and was a globe covered with the same grasses, hairlike, current disturbed—the earth as it had always been. Her breath caught. No, the view from one of the houses they'd lived in when she was a child. She couldn't remember which. Which house. They'd moved so much then. Oh, houses, help!
"Wasn't that pretty?" she said to her dark reflection, and felt her words inside swell up. Martin was too considerate to be a good salesman. He made sure a farmer understood a policy completely before he sold it to him. He'd spend an afternoon in a kitchen or farmyard, clarifying and advising, and then the prospect would decide he wanted more time to think about it, or say he didn't need a policy at all. So Martin was making less money than when he was teaching. He took part-time jobs to keep them in food and clothes, without having to draw on their savings, and since the spring had been working full time as a farm hand for Evan Savitsky; during the planting season they plowed until three in the morning, using the tractor headlights to see by, and for two weeks Martin slept over at the Savitskys'; these days, Mrs. Savitsky picked him up at six in the morning and then Evan brought him into town at night, drove straight to Main Street, and went into the tavern—Eichelburger's one night, Schommer's the next, so as not to show favoritism—and Martin, who didn't drink and never set foot in either place, had to walk home.
She asked him if Evan couldn't practice a little restraint and drop him off at home first, and Martin said, "A man should be grateful for what he gets and not expect to get one thing more."
The worst part to her was that he was working with his hands. The country here was so identical from mile to mile, it was the same as the sky above it; bleached bleak infinity. It was for the buffalo, for grazing creatures and tumbleweed that moved over it like cloud shadow made corporeal by a stroke of the Lord. When men uprooted it and fought it and tried to subdue it to their needs, it became a part of their outlook on life, was in whatever task they took up, was the direction they moved in, and they were never free of the bleakness or the dirt of it; or if they managed to transcend its encompassing futility and find success, it came in a way that was too unlimited to handle, with so few people to talk to and balance them off, and they saw others only as objects to be used, or not used—simply discarded—as if success had rendered them all powerful as the land. Rough clods. Servants of the earth. A hard taskmaster makes the worst sort of slave.
You could mold an outlook unattached to it with knowledge from other frames, and now Martin moved down highways or section roads, or through wheat fields or time, with individual grace and with "Martin" written all over him. His father would always be a farmer, no matter his present occupation, and her father, for all his travel and boastfulness and womanly bickering and affectations and worldly mind, carried the soul of the land inside him.
Sometimes she ached for more college education, even a simple stint of summer school again.
She lay back on the bed with a hand over her eyes. She was holding herself more at a distance from Martin. Many days she felt relieved when he left the house, even, but the children, and especially Tim, for some reason, filled her with a loneliness that had no limits, no bottom to touch or height to rise above, and then she couldn't wait for him to get home. She needed him now. This morning she'd been thinking about her mother as she looked when she was young, working at the cookstove, hoisting the cold butter crock up from the well, turning down bedclothes, and saw how these simple acts were given dignity and significance by her maternal hand; and then she remembered her mother's favorite photograph of her, taken when she was five or six, which her mother had had enlarged and gave as a wedding gift when she married Martin.
She's on the plain in a pair of baggy jumpers that fasten around her upper arms and just above her knee. Her limbs are plump and dimpled. She has on a sunbonnet that's too big for her, which must be her mother's, and part of her mother's affection for the picture. Its ties are hanging loose over her shoulders and throat. She's smiling into the camera's eye and holding out a child's bouquet of black-eyed Susans and blossoming grasses. The sky and the plain are nearly the same shade of gray, and are the only elements in the picture besides her, except for an irregular grayish puff or tuft just above her shoulder, as though rising from the bonnet, which must be a tree.
The more she thought of her mother, the more real the picture became, as if the sun were appearing from behind a cloud, and just when it seemed that all of the details were as lifelike as on the day the picture was snapped, she, the girl in jumpers, turned and walked out of sight. All that was left was the plain and the dark shape against the sky. A Cottonwood tree.
She sensed the nearness of Martin and was up out of the bed; she listened a second, and then started toward the other end of the house, and was passing the oval of the oil heater, when somebody started rapping at the back door. Who? When Martin got home, he came into the side porch, where he left his work clothes, and into the kitchen that way, never through the back door. She lifted the curtain and looked; the porch was empty, bare. A broom stood. The back door, like the others, was unlocked. Then the rapping came again, and was so close and loud it startled her. Only a neighbor, she thought, but as she went toward the door her knees weakened and sent tremors up inside her inner thighs. She opened the door enough to see out.
"Boo," Martin said. He was below her at the bottom of the steps, a smile on his dust-colored, sweat-streaked face. She opened the door wider on him.
"What on earth are you doing back here?" she asked, and was surprised at the alarm in her voice.
"This," he said, and lifted his arm and held out a brace of pheasants. Their green heads and shimmering breast feathers gleamed in the dim light, and the shifting eye rings were like poppies to her.
"Where did you get those?"
"Hunting! Where do you think?"
"You've been hunting?"
"Evan took me. Aren't they beauties, hon?"
His deep bass voice made a dense sound within the confines of the lean-to porch. He went to the edge of the swath of light from the kitchen, reached up, located a strand of wire on the low roof, and wrapped the wire around the pheasants' legs. They swung noiselessly from side to side, and then one wing outstretched and sliced into the light.
"I'll leave them there," he said. "I can clean them in the morning I guess."
"You should do it now."
"No, they'll be all right. It's plenty cold out. Well, maybe I should bleed them. No, no, it's too late for that. Oh, they'll be all right here. We'll have some for supper tomorrow night, and I'll take the rest to the locker, if there are any rest left."
He came up the steps and she went to embrace him, but he held up his hand. "You'd better wait for that till I wash first. I'm filthy." He tossed his cap onto the counter beside the sink. "How have you been?"
"The same."
"And the kids?"
"Fine."
"It's too bad I hardly get a chance to see them anymore."
"Yes."
He dipped water from the pail into the basin in the sink and she saw his broad back as it swung from vessel to vessel (the municipal water was still too dirty to wash with), and was disturbed that he'd been hunting; it was the first time in five years. Five seasons ago, his closest friend other than Father, Ivan Savitsky, Evan's older brother, went pheasant hunting with his hired man, a full-blooded Sioux, and they got more than their limit and stopped in a roadside bar to cele
brate and boast, and bought two cases of beer, and on their way home, on the curve outside Bowdon, went off the road in the car and rolled several times and were thrown from it and killed. Martin drove out when he heard and came home diminished and shaken, and said, "I'll never hunt again. Every time I lift a shotgun, I'll see that ditch. There were beer bottles and shotgun shells and blood and pheasant feathers everywhere. And them." Sometime later, when they went around the same curve in their car, she saw a pair of diamond-shaped signs with black X's on them, and they reminded her of her brothers, Conrad and Filing, who were killed in a similar accident, at one time, in the same car, too much for her now.
Martin looked over his shoulder. "Are you all right?” he asked. "Is everything all right, dear?"
"Yes."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"What a day I" He put his glasses on the counter and plunged his hands into the basin and rubbed his face until his skin squeaked.
She took the food out of the oven, put it on the table, and sat in a chair facing his. The inadequacies of the mind, or else its omniscience. What was it trying to tell us in times of confusion? Was it a friend?
"Just after lunch, when Evan and I were getting the tractors ready, Evan's neighbor, Frank Crimmins, drove up. I figured something was brewing. Crimmins doesn't usually get out of bed until noon, and then he loafs around the house while his wife does most of the chores. He's only got a half section of land and hasn't even got his hay in yet!
"Well, he drove up and said that the pheasants were thick as grass down around Pingree. He said the three of us deserved the day off—that was some way of putting it, when you consider Evan has six sections to get in before the freeze, and that I have no say in it, and that Crimmins is perpetually off—he said we deserved the day off and should take it off, by Lord, and go get some pheasants for ourselves before the sportsmen came up from all over and took them from us. Oh, he can talk a stream.
"Evan asked me if I'd like to go, which surprised me. I know he's afraid of falling behind this year, even with me on as a hand, and then Ivan—But there's a split in that man!"
Martin turned his glistening face to her, looking blind without his glasses. "As conscientious as he is about work, it takes second place to him if there's an opportunity for some sport. Crimmins saw that, too, and started fast-talking again. I told Evan I didn't have a license and, anyway, had sold my gun since— He said I didn't need a license and could use his old 20-gauge. He was already convinced."
Martin slipped his glasses on and leaned against the washstand and crossed his arms. "But he wouldn't leave that easily, either, not Evan. No, we were out by the gas tank, greasing up the tractors, as I said, and he pointed out a chicken by the garden, about thirty feet off, and whispered, 'See that? Watch. I'll check with the powers that be and see if my aim's on. If it's on, we go. If it's not, to hell with it.'
"He held up the gun and gave it a hard pump, and the chicken took off squawking, flapping its wings, with a big glob of grease on it. Oh, oh, ya ha! It just goes to show you the luck that man has! So we got out the guns, took off in separate cars, and went down to Pingree, and within an hour we all had our limit, all three of us, and that's not all. I got some work done on my own, too."
He came up and kissed her along the forehead. "But, you. What about you? How was your day?"
"Fine."
"You didn't get overtired again?”
"No."
"You're sure you're not?"
"Yes, I'm sure."
He passed his hand over her hair, and she glanced up and saw him staring beyond her at the wall clock.
"Is it that late?" He sat and helped himself to the peas and potatoes and canned-salmon loaf. "I'd better get moving, then. I'll be late the way it is."
"What for?"
His fork hesitated in the air and his large eyes, nearly circular in their intensity, studied her in disbelief. "What for? It's Friday night!"
"Oh. I forgot."
"You made salmon loaf!"
"The other, I mean." On Fridays he played pinochle with Dr. Koenig, Eldon Pflager, William Runyon, and a dozen other parishioners, at Father Schimmelpfennig's.
"You should know by now I'm as regular as clockwork," he said, and clucked his tongue. "I mentioned getting some other work done. Evan dropped me off at the Stahls' and Hyerdahls'. I've told you about them." His voice suddenly drew away and became more guarded with her. "They're both on the line for new policies, and I talked with them while Evan waited the car for me. Then we tried to finish up an eighty with the pony drills. Then the rain came. I'm sorry I'm late. I'm not sure about Stahl, but I'm positive Hyerdahl will buy, and that'll be the third policy this month. Won't that be nice?"
"It will."
"Weell," he said, prolonging the word in the local farmers' way, so it sounded nearly like "wheel," which irritated her, and then pushed his plate aside. "I'd better get going now."
He went back to the bedroom to put on a suit. She cleared the table and dumped the oily, grayish water out of the washbasin, and then took down an aluminum pan and started the dishes in the sink. Hands, strong and warm, smelling of after-shave, gripped her shoulders hard. She turned, startled and annoyed, and the annoyance stayed as she studied him, sharpening her perception of his necktied chest and face and lips, and then she was angry at herself for being aroused.
"Are you sure you're all right?" he asked.
"Yes. You frightened me."
Their eyes met and held. He narrowed his, and then leaned and lifted her and she turned her face, grazing his close stubble with her chin, and fitted her mouth to the familiar shape of his. Then her feet touched and she stepped back and couldn't look at him.
"Alpha, it's the only time I ever go out in this town."
"I know."
"I have two cigars, and most nights win a couple dollars, especially with Father as my partner, and those dollars help."
"I know that. Go on."
"I'll stay if you insist."
"No, go your way."
He went to the door and snapped its lock for a change. "Why don't you wait up for me?" He backed down the steps looking uncomfortable and ashamed and closed the door.
She breathed out and leaned against the sink to ease the moist swelling in her and a nimbus formed around the light bulb above the table, and then trembled and sent out shafts of incipient tears. These stories of his were his way of avoiding whatever he was afraid of. What if she'd taken the time to tell him about the picture, and how she'd felt about it? She probably never would now. She wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand and straightened her dress. She wouldn't be weak like every other woman she knew, all of whom she hated.
She grabbed up an oleomargarine package and broke the pellet of dye at its center and squeezed and kneaded the package until the lard-colored margarine turned a uniform gold, then threw the package on the counter, went into the living room, switched on her lamp, sat in her rocker, and took The Ordeal of Richard Feverel off the table and opened it at her marker, a scrap of dress material; Adrian, the wise, fat, self-anointed philosopher, was giving another blowhard's lecture to young Richard. She closed the book with a bang.
On the wall across the room was a set of corner shelves Martin's father had built and sent to her. In the box along with them he'd enclosed a white statuette of an elephant, which tasted, she discovered, like alum, or worse. The boys wanted it for their playroom, but she put it up on the shelves when Martin installed them. They were such a clutter now she couldn't see the thing. She moved her tongue over a canker sore to a molar at the back of her mouth that was so hollowed out she could fit the tip of her tongue into its sharp-edged crater. She hoped none of her children inherited her teeth. The worst sins of avarice and ambition and greed rose out of poverty, somebody said. "For the love of money is the root of all evil." Paul again.
There was a knock again at the back door. Martin. He'd decided not to play cards. Home with her. She ran into the kitchen and u
nlocked the door and pulled it wide.
A tall man with a hooked nose and a shock of curly hair showing in front of the raised bill of his baseball cap stood on the top step, only inches from her—the young man who'd bought the lot across from their garden, dug a basement with a tiling spade, built a little house, and moved into it in the spring with his new wife. She was so sure it would be Martin she might as well have embraced the kid. Man.
He raised the bill of his cap. "Hi."
"Hello."
"Is your husband in?"
"No."
"Oh. Well, I was out hunting today and got my limit of pheasants, and it's too much for just my wife and I, so we were wondering if you folks might like a couple of them."
"We would, usually, any other time—" She looked up and saw that his brown eyes, moist in the light, were studying her with a calculating, interested stare. One eye was slightly crossed in a handsome way. She made a gesture over his shoulder and he turned. "Martin was out and got his limit, too."
He slid his hands into his back pockets, his elbows turned out, and began swinging them back and forth. "You won't need any more from me then, I guess."
"No, I'm sure not."
"My wife, she said I should come and ask, so here I am, asking." He made an amused gurgle at the back of his throat.
Beyond the Bedroom Wall Page 27
