Heading Out to Wonderful (7 page)

So he lay in bed and dreamed until he couldn’t stand it any more, the rejections by the right girls from the right families, then he went out shopping. Picture it: touring the back roads of the county, in his black Cadillac, driving past farms, back up into hollows where they’d never even had electricity or indoor plumbing until about ten years before, where some children had never seen anybody who wasn’t related to them. Picture Boaty driving and just looking, looking at every female face he saw. Girls of twelve and thirteen, fifteen at the oldest, barefoot girls wearing their mother’s or sister’s dresses, hanging slack from the shoulders, billowing in the breeze around where their breasts had not yet grown. He liked the blonde-haired girls the best.

He found one girl. She was fourteen. She was standing on a porch back up in a hollow, holding a baby in her arms, staring off at the sky. Boaty stopped his car, got out, and went up on the porch to knock on the door. He talked first to her mother, while the girl wandered down to look at his car, shyly putting the baby’s hand on its hot, shiny surface. Then he took out a roll of money and talked to the father, he guessed it was the father, a man who looked too old and tired to be her father but said he was, who stood stooped over in the door, big arms and a puny chest, and the man listened carefully to what Boaty had to say, the offer he had to make, and then he went and got his gun and just stood without saying anything, in the doorway, while Boaty raised his hands, his money still visible, and slowly backed down the stairs and to his car. He carefully got in and started the engine and purred away without saying another word.

Two miles down the road, he stopped the car and threw up in a ditch. He shook all the way back to town, shook until he was inside the safety of his own house.

Finally, he found her, way out in Arnold’s Valley. She was picking beans from a garden, dressed in a man’s white shirt and pants that must have belonged to a brother. She was taller than he’d hoped for, probably a little taller than he was, and older; she must have been at least fifteen.

She was girlish but already full and wide-hipped, her breasts making a real difference inside the man’s shirt. Her beautiful blonde hair hung to her waist, covering her face as she bent over to root among the vines, showing her angelic features as she stood up to put the beans in the basket slung on a leather strap over her shoulder. She wasn’t exactly the thing he’d set out to find, but the minute he saw her he knew she was the one.

This time the negotiations went better. He’d learned some diplomacy that didn’t cause a father’s hand to reach for the shotgun right off the bat. The mother answered the door, took one look at him in his black suit, the stomach straining the buttons of his white shirt, the mother barefoot on the wooden floor and holding, of course, another baby in her arms. She took one look and said, “I’ll get my husband,” and backed away into the shadow of the kitchen.

He appeared, a strong blond man who must have been ten years younger than his wife, or so it looked, although with those people it was always hard to tell. The men stayed young from hard work, the women got old from having babies year after year.

“Yes sir?” the man said. He looked suspicious but not lethal, a yard dog trained to be wary of strangers.

“I’ll say it straight out. I have a business proposition for you. One that’ll suit us both, I guarantee.”

“What kind of business?”

“Business that’ll change your life. Business that’ll put money in your pocket and a smile on your face.”

“I don’t need no life insurance, and I don’t want no encyclopedia.” The man started to close the door.

“This has to do, sir, with making you money, not you spending the money you worked so hard to make.”

There was a long pause while the man thought it over. “Well, you better come in.” So Boaty went inside, and, when his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw it for what it was, a poor place that never got clean, the woman having no time for cleaning what with all those babies, who seemed to be everywhere, all ages, all blond.

In a clean house, the knobs of things—doors, cabinets—are the first things to get dirty, because they’re always being touched by unclean hands. In a dirty house, those are the only things that are free from grime, because the hands that open and close the doors rub the filth and oil from them.

The house smelled like bacon fat and laundry detergent. The people smelled like bacon fat and pig shit and sweat.

“You want something? Whiskey? Coffee? Water?” and Boaty knew he should take something but he didn’t know what because the thought of the water scared him, so he accepted a small glass of clear whiskey that would probably kill him anyway, but he had to take something. The man had a glass of the liquor sitting on the kitchen table, the open jar next to it, and the stuff hadn’t killed him yet, so Boaty figured he could give it a try.

It tasted like copper and kerosene, but he drank it down quickly, because he knew that was what he was supposed to do. Then they set to talking.

“Let me be straight, friend. I want to buy your farm.”

The man drank down his moonshine and just stayed put for a while. He laughed.

“This farm? My farm?”

“How big is it?

“It’s a hundred and forty-two acres, all but twelve of which is shit, plain shit. Rock and limestone and dirt that’s been planted and fucked over for so long it’s near about dead. Man can’t hardly feed his family.”

“I’ll pay you two thousand dollars. Cash money. But that’s not the best part.”

“We wouldn’t have no place to go.”

“That’s the best part I was telling you about. You’d stay here. Nothing would change, except you wouldn’t have to pay the land taxes any more.”

“What’s the real deal here?”

Boaty waited while the man poured himself another shot and drank it down, his lips pursing to the edge of the glass like a baby at the nipple. When he had set the glass down, pushed his hair back from his eyes and looked up again, Boaty finally spoke. He spoke very quietly, and lowered his eyes, dipped his chin so that the roll of flesh rose around his buttoned white shirt. “I want the girl.”

“You what?”

“I want the girl. I want to marry her. Give her a better life.”

“How old are you?”

“Forty-three.” He thought of exaggerating even more, how would this man know, but he didn’t want to push his luck.

“I can’t do that.”

“Course you can. One less mouth to feed. A better life than you could give her. Three thousand dollars, let’s say; that’s a lot of money. And a tractor. I’ll buy you a new tractor.”

The man looked wistful, helpless. Having never been offered a choice in anything he ever did, even choosing a wife, the one he had being four months pregnant when they married, after having had a single encounter after a church supper when he was sixteen and didn’t even know how to do the thing with any respect or affection or thought. Again, now, he didn’t know what to do and knew there was nowhere to go for advice.

“Which girl?”

“She’s out there right now, picking beans in the garden.”

“Sylvan. My first girl. She’s got my heart, that girl.”

“And what’s that heart worth to her now, you reckon? How old is she?”

The man paused, ruffled his fingers. “Sixteen. I think. No, seventeen.”

“What use is a girl on a farm? What good is she to you now? You want her grabbed up by some trash? Maybe she has been already. She’s seventeen. I don’t pay top dollar for used goods. Maybe I should reconsider.”

“Sylvan is a good girl. She’s special. Not just to me. Ain’t nobody been near her, that’s for sure. I’ve been careful. Real careful.”

“Can she read?”

“Course she can read.”

“Mathematics?”

“Some. Not division. But she’s bright. Listens to all them shows on the radio.”

“Good. A good girl. A little older than I hoped, but she’ll do.”

“You’re the one that’s asking, mister. If you don’t want her, and I ain’t saying this is a done deal, you don’t want her, just walk away.”

“I’m offering you, say, three thousand dollars, a new tractor, and a better life for both you and your family and the girl Sylvan.”

“And I hear you and I’ll think about it. Now, with all due respect, I want you to leave my house.”

“There’s one condition,” Boaty said as he stood.

“Figured,” said the father.

“If she runs off on me, you lose the farm. I take it back, and you have nowhere to go. Understand?”

There was a long pause. “What if she dies or something else?”

Boaty hadn’t thought that far. “There is no something else,” he said. “No divorce. No running off. But I guess if she dies, you stay put. As long as she dies my wife. So it’s kind of ‘for richer or poorer’ for you, too. You got that?

“When she’s gone, she’s gone. She won’t be coming back, and you won’t be seeing her. Not at Christmas, not at Easter. You’ll never see your grandchildren, at least not by her.”

“That’s pretty hard.”

“Life is hard, isn’t it?”

The man looked out the window at his oldest daughter, straining in the hot sun to find every last bean on the vine. The white shirt was soaked with sweat, and her hair clung in tendrils to her neck. Boaty thought she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

“I got to consider her. Whether she’d like it. Don’t even know I could convince her. She’s got ideas, like I said.”

“When can I come back?”

There was a long pause. Two men in a kitchen, the woodstove, always hot, the flypaper hanging down, encrusted, the whiskey clear and still in the jar, the girl in the garden, the boys bawling for lunch and the baby for the teat. For three whole minutes he sat and waited.

“Sunday week.”

“We understand each other? You get what I’m saying?”

“I ain’t stupid, sir. I heard every word. I’ll think on it.”

“Sunday week?”

“That’s what I said.”

“I’ll bring cash money.”

“I asked you to leave. I’d like you to do that now.”

They shook hands, like two men at a funeral. Boaty was careful not to wipe his hands on his pants until after he had gotten in the car and driven away, the girl standing in the garden, basket full, staring after his Cadillac until the dust had settled back on the road and the drone of the cicadas could be heard again, the wind rushing through the corn, replacing the swish of the car’s wheels, the dust from the dirt road blowing into the girl’s eyes.

When he went back in two weeks’ time, the girl was standing on the porch, wearing an old dress that was clean and smelled of sun and fresh night air. Beside her was a suitcase that Boaty gently explained to her she wouldn’t be needing. Her whole family was gathered around her, except the father, silent, dressed as though for Sunday church.

Inside, the big blond man sat at the kitchen table. He looked drunk, the Mason jar empty in front of him on the greasy flowered linoleum. He looked like he’d been crying, but it was hard to tell. Boaty put a document in front of him, a piece of paper that gave Harrison Boatwright Glass the right to marry the girl, and ownership of the farm. The man didn’t even ask what the paper was. He just signed his name carefully and in full.

Boaty got out the cash and then hesitated. “You made it clear to the girl that this is forever? No running off?”

“She understands that.”

“It says so in the contract you just signed. So you better be sure.”

“I’m sure. She knows the deal. She’s yours, mister.”

Then, after Boaty had put the cash money on the table, without counting it the father handed over her birth certificate, yellowed and stained, and all he said was, “When do I get my tractor?”

CHAPTER SIX

W
HEN THEY GOT
to the cattle guard at the end of the rutted dirt drive that led to the gravel road that led to the blacktop back to town, Sylvan touched Boaty’s arm and said two of the only four words she was to say that day: “Please stop.” She said it in a gentle voice with an accent that was strangely refined.

She turned her head and looked back through the cloud of dust at her family gathered on the porch. The father had joined his wife, his hand in her hand, both shy and sad. Around them, the brothers and sisters, one boy with a baby of his own on his arm, stood and stared. Sylvan looked for two full minutes, still, not moving, like she was taking a photograph in her mind, the hot breeze from the road spinning blonde cobwebs of her hair around her head. Then the family all scattered, running off to do chores or play in the fields.

The father stood alone on the porch, and the light caught the tears in his eyes as he forlornly waved at his leaving child, and she waved back, although he could never have seen her. She seemed to want to call out, to cry some last thing to him, but she made no sound at all. After a time she turned back and looked straight ahead. There were tears on her cheeks. She did not brush them away, or try in any way to hide them.

“Now?” Boaty asked.

She nodded, and they rode the twenty miles back to town in silence. At Boaty’s house, a justice of the peace waited, along with Will Haislett and Alma, who had been called to be witnesses because Will was practically the only man around who would stand up for him. With them stood the foremen of two of Boaty’s farms, hired hands standing awkwardly in dirty shoes and clean white shirts, buttoned at the collar, their big red hands fumbling with handkerchiefs in the heat.