Early Warning (19 page)

“Who told you that?”

“Granny Rosanna.”

“She must be remembering wrong.” He didn't say that Frank had been thirteen at the time, which was bad enough.

“How old was he?”

“Laws were different then.”

“How old was he?”

“Tell me, is your name Walter?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Because your grandfather Walter drove his mom and dad crazy asking questions.”

“Really?”

Joe looked at Jesse, said, “Get down off the seat of the tractor.”

He got down. Then he said, “Really? Crazy? Like they went to a mental asylum?”

“No, like they whipped him.”

“Are you going to whip me?”

“Have I ever whipped you?”

“No.”

“Am I going to whip you?”

“No.”

Then there was a silence, and Jesse said, “When can I learn to drive the tractor?”

Joe laughed and said, “When you're thirteen. Let's see. That was summer, so Frank was thirteen and a half when he drove that car. You are eight and a half. So you have a while.”

“Five years.”

Joe allowed himself a smile, then said, “Good subtraction. You must be a smarty-pants.”

Jesse didn't smile, only said, “When is it going to stop raining?”

“The weatherman says later in the week.”

“Is the corn ruined?”

“Not yet.”

“Are you worried?”

“I'm never worried.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Joe said, “something always works out on a farm.”

—

IT WAS
Henry's idea that Claire and Paul would take their two weeks' vacation in England, where he was helping at a dig not far from York—he wasn't an archeologist, but he thought all medievallit professors should get out of the library and into the dirt or the bog. He wrote to Claire that it was a beautiful spot—there was plenty to see, not only York Minster, but the Shambles, an old street still left from the Middle Ages, as well as a castle and several museums. She
and Paul could also go for walks nearby, in the Vale of York, or a little farther away, in the Lake District.

Rosanna said, “Well, Granny Elizabeth would have loved that, though the Chicks and the Cheeks, as she never forgot to tell me, were from Wessex, which is way at the other end of England.” This reminded Rosanna of something, and three days later, in Claire's mail came a little box, wrapped in white paper. When Claire opened it, inside there was a tiny lace handkerchief, quite discolored but lovely, of handmade crochet lace in a scalloped pattern. There was a note attached. Claire opened it carefully. There was her father's handwriting: “Made by my great-grandmother, Etta Cheek, sometime around 1830. Saved for Claire, March, 1942.” She had never seen the box, the handkerchief, or the note. She was three years old in 1942. She burst into tears. She thought she could smell the scent of his clothes rising around her.

When she called the next day and asked, her mother said, “Oh goodness. That year, Frank was in Europe. We simply forgot your father's birthday, so here is what Walter did. He went and found a box of different things, one for each of you children. He let everyone choose from the box what you would most like to have. Lillian chose a feather. Joe chose a sprig of something, thyme? Lavender it was. Henry chose a coin. And we put away a photo of your father and a couple of army buddies for Frank. This handkerchief went to you. We set it aside for safekeeping, and you know what happens when I do that. When you said you might go to England, it struck me that that was what was in that little box in my dresser drawer. I'm sorry it has taken me so long to…Oh, Claire, honey, don't cry.”

But it was no use—Claire cried and cried. She wrote to Henry, did he remember that coin, but of course he did. It was an Indian-head gold dollar, he replied in a letter back. He wrote that he kept it with the Marcus Aurelius coin he'd found loose in a muck pit in Winchester. Once again, she opened out the tiny handkerchief. The very thin linen was four inches by four inches, and the crocheted border looked as if it had been made out of sewing thread in a pattern of leaves, like elm leaves. She smoothed them under her finger. That very afternoon, she took it to a picture framer to preserve.

Paul did not like the fact that their bed-and-breakfast had twin beds with footboards. He was too tall for footboards—he had to sleep
on his back with his legs spread and his feet to either side of the footboard, or else on his side, curled up, and one time he stretched out and bumped his head on the headboard. And then, for breakfast, they served the toast cold, in a rack, unbuttered, and when you buttered it, it fell apart. Henry showed them around; Paul could not help correcting him—surely York Minster was York Cathedral? Were those really kings in the choir screen (though Claire could see that they had crowns on)? Was that window really about the War of the Roses? Had Henry ever read
Richard III
? Henry was polite every moment.

The third night, sitting across from her in his pajamas, on the other twin bed, Paul said, “I sound like an ass, don't I?”

“I don't think Henry is ever wrong about this sort of thing.”

Paul said, “He's been very decent.”

“He likes you.”

“I can't imagine why.”

She sat down next to him. The bed dipped almost to the floor. She said, “I can't imagine why not.”

“I know I can be a jerk.”

“You don't try to be a jerk. The jerkiness just pops out once in a while.”

Paul put his arm around her, and they lay back on the twin bed. The next morning, Paul asked for a room with a double bed, and as it happened, someone was checking out that very day, and the owner of the bed-and-breakfast would move their things. That day, Henry had to work, and so they went back to York Minster, bought a nice simple guidebook with large pictures and short explanations, and enjoyed their morning very much. The best part of the day, besides “tea,” was the hour she spent in a small bookstore, uneven floors on three levels, books piled everywhere willy-nilly. On the shelves marked “Local Interest, Yorkshire,” she saw
Wuthering Heights
, which she had been supposed to read in ninth grade and had never even started. She bought it for a half-crown.

Henry took them to supper in an Indian restaurant with eight of the other diggers, all of whom were about her age or younger, enrolled in colleges and graduate schools in the United States and England. Four of the boys had beards, which Claire thought was interesting. One couple lived in a tent not far from the dig. That day, Henry had let them take a shower in his room, because they had spent
the last three days digging up the tanning pit to see if there was anything in there. The girl gaily related how the boy had had to hold her by the ankles for the last bits, as she scraped the bottom of the pit with her trowel. “Up and down, in and out, and stinking to high heaven.”

Henry turned to her. “In the Middle Ages, they tanned leather with manure.”

The boy said, “It was pointless to bathe, since we had to do the whole thing. So we just slept outside the tent. Thank goodness, it hasn't rained.”

Claire looked them up and down. They seemed clean enough now. One of the boys was a Negro man. He was about Claire's age, and had gone to school in New York. His name was Jacob Palmer. He didn't seem to realize that he was the only Negro in the restaurant. He chatted and laughed at Henry's jokes just as the others did. Claire noticed that she glanced at him more often than Paul did, but Paul was from Philadelphia, not Des Moines. Claire was in favor of civil rights. She'd thought it was shocking when that church was bombed in Alabama the year before, but everyone forgot about that when Kennedy was assassinated. Then those three boys, just about her age, were murdered in Mississippi, and their bodies were discovered four days before she and Paul left for England—eight or nine days ago now. She hadn't heard any news about them since coming here, but looking at Jacob Palmer in this sea of white people made her think of them. However, it was easy to be in favor of civil rights when she spent all day sitting in Paul's office, listening to his patients (or their mothers, actually, since many of his patients were children with ear infections) babble on about whether now, since President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, they were going to let Negroes into the Wakonda Country Club. And why not? thought Claire, who had been there twice. There were plenty of Negroes there already—caddies, waiters, groundskeepers. Jacob Palmer talked just like the other students—about the excavations, the grid, the sherds, the artifacts.

That night, she began reading
Wuthering Heights.
She didn't put the book down for two hours—Paul was sound asleep. Heathcliff was said to be dark-haired, but when she read about him, the face in her mind was Frank's, not Joe's. Two days later, when Henry took them to a town called Otley for just a little walk, and not into very steep countryside, that was where she imagined everything in the
book to take place. It was a shocking book, but when she finished it, she turned back to the first page and started over.

—

AFTER HE DELIVERED
his trunk and his suitcase and met his two roommates, Tim drove back to McLean. He did not drive Wednesday to his house, where they were expecting him for a last lunch before Lillian took him back to school and left him there; he drove Tuesday, late, to Fiona's, and parked on the road up beside the horse pasture. It was nearly midnight. The weather had been hot and humid, and there were flies and midges everywhere. Fiona was leaving for Missouri in two days, for a college that was known, from what Tim had heard, solely for its horse-riding program. Rocky, who had been some kind of champion for 1963, had been sent ahead. Debbie had earned enough money working for a summer day camp to take over Prince's expenses for the school year. The only one who got nothing in all of this, as far as he could tell, was himself.

Tim jumped the little ditch and crossed the Cannons' yard to his tree. He chinned himself on the lowest branch, then caught his foot on a little knob maybe four feet off the ground, and swung onto the branch. Then he stood up, stepped onto the next branch and the one above that. From there, he jumped lightly to the roof of the back porch, squatted down, and duck-walked to Fiona's window. The other window looking over the roof of the porch was a bathroom, so the curtains were usually closed. Only once, sometime in May, had the curtain been flung wide, and a face, the face of Mr. Cannon, stared out over the roof. But Tim had frozen outside the triangle of light, and the curtain closed again. Fiona remembered that particular night as their most romantic. The window was up and the screen unlatched. When he put his hand on the sill, Fiona said, “Who's there?” in a soft, trilling voice. Tim said, “I don't know,” also in a soft voice. This exchange made them laugh. He pulled the screen out and slid through the opening, then turned and secured the screen in the window frame. The light of the full moon, which had been obscured by the thick foliage of the tree, shone on the bare floor of her room and the end of her bed. He saw that she was totally naked. He said, “Hot, huh?”

She laughed again.

Tim began to take off his clothes.

She had a rule that he couldn't come during horse shows (and there were lots of horse shows in the summer). Two nights she had been sick, and he had stayed away for a week after spraining his ankle playing baseball. What with taking all his stuff to the university and then some orientation classes, he hadn't been here for six nights. He lifted the elastic of his shorts over his erection, dropped them to the floor, and slid in next to her, partly under the sheet. She kissed him. Her lips were always sort of flat and hard to begin with, then they softened and warmed. He pressed his erection against her stomach, and her leg came over his, drawing him closer; then she put her hands on either side of his head and slipped her tongue into his mouth. His cock got harder—too hard, he thought. If he entered her now, he knew he would come quickly. He decided to think of something, and then he thought of burning his tongue on hot soup. He thrust once, and then another time, and then he stopped. Her eyes were closed. She turned him over on his back and rose above him, smiling, in the moonlight.

She moved slightly, smoothly. The bedsprings creaked one time, and she stopped. Crazy as she was, she had never done anything that might disclose to her parents (fortunately, upstairs and at the other end of the hall) what was taking place in her bedroom. She said that they were sure she was still a virgin and “occupied her time” so thoroughly with the horses that she didn't have a moment for boys. It was true that, since the beginning of the summer show season, they hadn't gone on a single actual date—not eaten a bite together, seen a movie, been to a party. Did anyone know they were even friends? Tim had said nothing to Steve or Stanley Sloan. Thinking of this secrecy made another thrust irresistible. She groaned, hardly louder than a breath.

She smiled a beautiful smile that he almost never saw, except in the framed picture on her desk of her on a horse, seven years old, her hair sticking up and her grin delirious with pleasure. Her smile made her eyes crinkle upward and revealed her inner mischievousness. He pulled her down and kissed her again, two or three times. Burning soup. Burning soup. His cock, just for a moment, stopped throbbing, but his balls made themselves felt, hard between his legs, ready to ache.

She froze, put her hands on his shoulders, and looked toward the
door of her room. Then he could hear it—a footstep in the hall. Her father's voice said, “Fiona?” Then, “Fiona?”

Fiona's head turned and she stared down at him, made an O with her mouth, and said, as if she were just waking up, “Huh? Everything okay, Daddy?”

“I thought I heard you.”

“What?” Just exactly as if she had been asleep.