Moving On (107 page)

A little later, when she got up and sat shivering in her bathrobe, tying her sneakers, she looked out the window and saw the slope, white with frost and sparkling beautifully with sunlight, and saw the empty lots, the barn with no animals near it, the chickenless chicken house, and marked again, quietly enough, the absence of Roger. The land was there still, but not the man, and the morning light that had always called Roger forth would call him forth no more. She cried a little in the bathroom, not through any excess of grief, but because she saw his razor. She was snooping in the bathroom cabinet and it was still there, an old razor, all the silver plating long ago worn off, so that it was like a brass artifact. It still had a blade in it, but she took it out and decided to keep the razor. After a bit she felt all right and went down and made oatmeal in an improvised double boiler and then cleaned out the cabinets thoroughly and washed all the wooden-handled knives and forks.

She was standing by the cabinet drying them with a coarse dishtowel when she heard the cattle guard rattle and in a minute saw Hank drive up to the back gate and park his old Oldsmobile beside the Ford. He got out and peeked in the Ford, as if to reassure himself by the familiar clutter in the back seat that she was somewhere about. His hair was a little longer but otherwise he seemed the same as he had seemed when she watched him leave the filling station. He still wore the brown suede coat.

She went to the screen and met him, attempting to look critical and severe, but it didn’t work. She had been lonely and he was very much the same—more greedy than talkative. In less than an hour they were attempting to restore the quilts and sheets of the bed to some sort of order. Patsy went over and raised the window. The day was warming, but the bedroom was still cold enough to raise goose bumps all over her body and she hoped to let some warm air in. She felt somewhat snippy and irritable about the rapidity of the proceedings. Hank looked complacent, and the look annoyed her a little. She got in bed and turned her back on him, so as not to see it. He immediately tried to turn her over, but she clutched the post at the head of the bed. One nice thing about the bed was that it had something she could hang on to.

“Quit,” she said. “Go rope a cow or something. Why bother with me? Thirty minutes you’ve been here and you’ve already got seduction out of the way and can get on with your work, whatever it is. Quit tugging.”

He tugged and she clung to the bedpost, gritting her teeth. She felt very determined.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Aren’t you happy?”

“No,” she said. “I have a very bad character, or I wouldn’t let myself be seduced so quickly.”

He decided her mood was best ignored, and got up and went to the kitchen. When he came back he had a plate of cold chicken, a large hunk of cake, and some milk. Patsy was feeling somewhat better. He sat on the bed eating chicken, cake, and milk while Patsy lazed and threw out small criticisms from the depths of the quilts.

“What an eye,” she said. “You spotted that chicken in two seconds, while you were chasing me through the kitchen. I have a feeling I’m little better than a chicken to you.”

“You’re warmer than this one,” he said, folding the end of the quilt over his bare feet.

He put the cake plate on the floor and Patsy leaned out of the covers and broke herself off a piece. She had some milk from his glass.

“Don’t get crumbs in the bed,” he said.

“Why not? There’s everything else in here.” She reached down and after some searching came out with the
Reader’s Digest
condensed book that she had read the night before. It had been kicked aside during the lovemaking.

They spent the morning in bed making up for months of separateness. She got seduced again, more satisfyingly, and when she finally got up insisted that he help her wrestle the old phonograph downstairs. Then they went out. The day had warmed up and was very sunny. They fiddled awhile with a tractor that was behind the barn and finally decided it was inoperative. Then they climbed up into the loft and sat in the open loft door looking across the land. Patsy became pensive and worried. Everything was so uncertain.

“What if Jim wants all this?” she asked. “He might come back and decide to be married to me now that we own a ranch.”

Hank had no views on what Jim might do. As they were about to go down she saw him eying a pile of hay. “Uh-oh,” she said. “I have a feeling I’m about to hear a hackneyed metaphor.” But for whimsey’s sake they inspected the hay together. It was the leavings of several barnloads of alfalfa and baled oats and was stubbly and scratchy and quite uninviting, even as a place to sit. “It would be like doing it on a bed of nails,” she said.

In the afternoon she decided it would be pleasant to retrace in the Ford the tour she had taken with Melvin, so they set out. They couldn’t find any real cowfeed, but she insisted that Hank put a few pounds of oats in a sack, in case cows came up and acted ravenous. “It’s my obligation to feed them if they approach, I believe,” she said, somewhat worried about it. She did not want to disappoint her own cows.

“Who would have thought I’d end up responsible for a bunch of cows?” she said, concentrating intently on her driving. The road was narrow, very bumpy, and full of roots, ruts, and what seemed to be small stumps. In the first two pastures they didn’t see a single cow, much to Patsy’s chagrin. Worried though she was about what to do if a lot came, she still wanted to show Hank that she had them. He was irreverent and skeptical and it was a relief, in the third pasture, to see twenty or more grazing with their calves among the mesquite, not far from the road. One or two cows raised their heads when they passed, but most paid the car no attention at all.

“We have no rapport yet,” she said. “They’re going to be sold, so I guess we never will.”

They came to the place where Melvin had done the feeding the day before. It was ringed with piles of dung. Patsy drove on adventurously; since the road was getting no worse it would be fun to see where it went. It ended a mile farther on, at a long shallow-looking pool of water with an earthen dam at one end. As they pulled up and stopped a large gray crane rose from the shallows and flew away. His take-off was so heavy and awkward it seemed he might not clear the mesquite, but as he rose higher he flew more swiftly and more gracefully and soon disappeared to the north.

They got out and sat on the dam of the tank for a while, plinking little stones into the water. “I wish Davey were here,” Patsy said. “He’d love all this.” She wished also that a few cows would come by. It seemed to her that she remembered that cows came to water in the afternoons, and it would be a nice way to meet some. It had grown quite warm.

“Too bad it isn’t summer,” he said. “We could go swimming.”

“You could. For all you know these tanks have alligators. I’m not swimming in unauthorized waters, even if I own them.”

When they got tired of sitting on the dam they went back to the Ford. In the course of some light necking Hank developed an urgent desire for her. She fanned it a bit, for amusement, only to discover that he was serious.

“Come on,” she said. “What can you be thinking of? This is a family car.”

“It’s my life’s ambition,” he said.

“I can believe that—it’s your only ambition.” She surveyed the Ford hastily, not really opposed, only a little skeptical. But he laid her in the front seat, and they managed, almost comfortably. The front seat was warm from the sun shining through the glass, a little too warm, and the outside air felt cool on her bare legs. She held to the steering wheel with one hand and Hank with the other. Afterward, standing barefoot on the short prickly grass, nude from the waist down and trying to untangle her rolled-together jeans and panties she felt it was all very silly, the whole business—what ridiculous moments it involved.

“I’m glad no cows came by,” she said.

It seemed to be a day for doing it. That night they ate the rest of the chicken, all the coleslaw, and most of the angel food cake, then built a fire and lay in front of it on the couch, watching very blurred television. They brought down some quilts and eventually ended up wearing quilts rather than clothes. Television was dull as well as blurry and sex easily drove it out. Aunt Rosemary’s couch, though not ideal, was more comfortable than the Ford. Afterward Patsy sat on the hearth, feeding the fire, her front warm and her back cool, basking, feeling wonderfully dreamy and lazy. They went to sleep scrunched on the couch and only hours later, when the fire was out and both were uncomfortable, did they manage to drag themselves and the quilts up to the bedroom. The sheets were icy.

When they awoke the next morning the floors were icy and the sheets warm, and their clothes were downstairs. It was bright and sunshiny outside but very cold in the bedroom, which made conditions ideal for dawdling. They dawdled and argued about the future, all pleasantly. Patsy got up, tiptoed to the john, and came back a mass of goose bumps, to snuggle gratefully back into the warm bed. Hank was for staying a day or two, but she was firm against it. “I have to get back to Dallas,” she said. “Anyway, I’d just sap your manhood if we stayed any longer.”

Hunger eventually drove them up, but the only thing left to eat was oatmeal. She made some brittle toast from bread that was a week old, and then firmly sent him off. “Maybe I’ll meet you every full moon, or something,” she said. She felt very good, glad that he had gone without a scene, and went into the house to get a washrag and the broom. The Ford needed cleaning out. She scrubbed the front seat and fished from between the seats a quarter Juanita was always complaining about having lost. She loosened the back seat a little and found another quarter, a nickel, two dusty pennies, a map of Salt Lake City, a blue comb, a ball-point pen, a tie clasp of Jim’s that she had not seen in years, toothpicks and chewing gum wrappers in quantity, and a dusty crumpled letter from Emma, written only three months after she and Jim married, when Emma was pregnant with Teddy. She reread the letter, which was full of the miseries of pregnancy, and of Flap’s neglect and general intransigence, all cheerfully related in the very literary epistolary style they had used in their letters in those days.

For a minute she was sad. She put the letter and Jim’s tie clasp in the glove compartment. He had liked it, she remembered; she could mail it to him. Working for IBM must require one to wear ties. It was sad, but the little gold tie clasp made the Jim she had once known and once married more vivid than anything the present Jim had done in many months. She sniffed at the car seat, to reassure herself, and then got out. It was still early and cold. The sun was turning the frost to water and it shone on the grass of the slope. The white moon was just fading in the sunlight, but it could still be seen, a faint half-moon hanging in the blue west over the road where Hank was driving. Once again, with Hank gone, the land and the buildings looked too empty; they registered the absence of all that Roger had brought to them. Patsy got the broom and washrag and hurried in to wash the pan of oatmeal before the oatmeal stiffened and became hard to remove.

Later, her bag packed and the dishes washed, she tidied up the house. Best to leave it, for a time, as it had been. She shoved the couch back into its usual place; it was easy to position because of the dust that had been beneath it on the bare floor. In tidying, Mrs. Daniels had not thought to sweep under the couch, little supposing it would be moved. What that lady or the lady whose couch it had been would have thought of the goings on of the night before did not disturb her; she had come, by the act of inheritance, to think of it as her house. She folded the quilts and put them back in the closet, thinking that if there was a ghost in the house it was the ghost of a man who had never spent much time in the living room. She returned the
Reader’s Digest
book to the glass-fronted case. Next trip she would bring some books and some food and some reading lamps and probably Davey, if all went well.

She washed the three cake plates, the chicken plate, and the bowl the coleslaw had been in and, on the way through town, dropped them at the minister’s house, near the church where the funeral had been held. He was still shaky, but kindly and inquisitive, and promised to get the plates to their respective owners. He said he hoped to see her in church when she was up. “We got a fine little nursery school,” he said. Patsy thanked him for everything and left for Dallas, her conscience clear.

16

I
T WAS A PLEASANT DRIVE
to Dallas, the pleasanter because there was no Davey squalling and no Juanita fidgeting and sucking in her breath every time they passed a car. In almost every little town along the way there was a roadside antique shop, and Patsy stopped to poke in almost every one of them. All she bought was a few funny turn-of-the-century postcards, but it was fun to stop and poke. She stopped in a town called Decatur and walked around a huge grotesquely ugly old courthouse. She pretended she was in France looking at cathedrals, and the old men spitting and whittling on a bench on the courthouse lawn looked at her as if she were an invader from a century they did not want to live in. Mostly she stopped in order to walk. She felt extraordinarily good, light and loose and fresh, and she kept smiling as she walked. It had been so long since she had had sex that she had forgotten what it could do for her, and she felt several twinges of regret that she had not stayed at the ranch another day. The minute Hank had driven away she had begun to miss him. But as she got closer to Dallas she began to develop a strong desire to be in her own house, and she determined to bundle up Davey and Juanita and drive straight on.

She discovered, however, that in her absence another mission had been prepared for her.

The first person she saw when she walked in was her mother, and the look on Jeanette’s face was so awful that it sent a current of shock and weakness through Patsy. Jeanette looked past tears, as if something had happened from which there could be no possible recovery. Patsy immediately assumed it had happened to Davey.