Run River (16 page)

He turned, wordless, to Martha.

“I never noticed anybody letting me run this ranch,” she said. “I can’t even write a check around here.”

“We did everything we could,” Lily said. “Your father wasn’t asking for any advice from us.”

“If only someone had let Everett know.” Sarah closed the box of old dance programs and pressed orchids which had claimed her attention since dinner. “If only someone had let
me
know.”

“If only someone had
thought.”
Martha leaned to touch Lily’s arm. “Sarah could have forwarded us some pamphlets from the United States Department of Agriculture. Or maybe she could have talked it over with
Peter.”

“I haven’t seen Peter since 1939.”

“This new one then,” Martha said. “I can’t ever think of his name.”

“It’s on all my note paper,” Sarah said with an attempt at serenity. “Robert Carr Warfield, Jr.” She paused. “Bud,” she added doubtfully.

“Bud. That’s it. Maybe you and Bud could have put your heads together and gotten this place in shape by air mail.”

Lily put down her knitting and looked up at Everett.

He understood: he had never meant to cast doubts upon their intentions. Nonetheless, he would be away another few months until his discharge was processed, and someone would have to take hold. Could they do that, could they get the poles up and the fields cleared and above all could they get the Engineers to do something about the levee before they found themselves floating around the Delta?

“You tell the men I’m running it and I will,” Martha said.

“Joe Templeton will help us,” Lily said.

“Joe Templeton will help us,” Martha repeated. “Oh my yes. Old Joe Templeton will absolutely leap at the opportunity to help us. Yes indeed. Joe Templeton can be depended upon, Everett, count on that.” She had been playing nervously with one of Lily’s knitting needles; now she jammed it into a ball of yarn and walked to the window.

Three days after the funeral Everett put Sarah on a plane back to Philadelphia (“back home,” she said, apparently oblivious to the pain she could cause her brother simply by shifting the locus of her belonging), carrying a paper bag full of dried hops to show to her children and to the stranger who was now her husband. The hops had been Martha’s idea. “They’ll think I’m bringing candy,” Sarah laughed, nervous as they stood in the rain at the gate. “I should have bought something, they won’t realize I came for a funeral.” Her voice trailed off as she watched the propellers catching. Tentatively, Everett put his arm around her shoulders, thick in her black fleece coat, too heavy for California. She turned, smiling brilliantly and blowing him a kiss. “You come visit us,” she called as she ran to the plane, “come visit whenever you can.”

After the plane had left the runway Everett sat in the empty parking lot, bent over the steering wheel of the station wagon with the rain blowing in through the open window and the strings of Christmas tinsel stars clinking in the wind between the low buildings, and cried for the first time that he could remember, not so much for his father as for Sarah’s defection, because she had lost all memory of the family they had been on that day when he got a little drunk on champagne.

14

“Everett,” she said. “Everett.”

He turned toward her, fumbling blindly through the wrinkled sheets for her body, meaning to draw her to him in the hot bed and drop back into sleep, wanting only to quiet her.

“Everett. Please. Everett.”

He opened his eyes. Lily lay on her back smoking a cigarette. He had been home from Bliss six months now, ever since his discharge in February, and through those two seasons of 1945 he had not slept one night without the dim troubled sense that Lily was awake, shifting in bed, walking around the room or sitting by the window in the dark. (She could not remember, she told him, a summer so hot: she had not been able to breathe for months.) Not until he woke in the morning would she be asleep, sometimes in the chair by the window, her legs stretched out across the low sill and her nightgown fallen from her shoulders; sometimes on the far edge of the bed, one hand flat on the floor, the other flung toward him but not touching him. She would lie for hours then without waking; one morning he had sat on the bed and held her hand for twenty minutes while she lay as if drugged, neither clenching nor withdrawing her fingers.

“Go to sleep,” he said now. “Go to sleep, baby.”

“I have to talk to you.”

He ran his fingers over the moist ends of her hair and across her face. Her eyes were wet.
Jesus Christ
. How many nights had he heard Lily crying. As some parents sleep through fire, thunderstorms, and voices at the back door only to wake at a child’s whisper, so Everett heard Lily crying at night. Her muffled sobs seemed to have broken his dreams for years. He had heard her even at Fort Lewis, even in Georgia, finally at Bliss. That was Lily crying in the wings whenever the priests came to tear up his mother’s grave. Lily cried in the twilight field where he picked wild poppies with Martha; Lily’s was the cry he heard those nights the kiln burned, the levee broke, the ranch went to nothing.

“What is it, Lily.”

She crushed out her cigarette. “I have to tell you.”

He brushed the damp hair back from her forehead and kissed her closed eyelids, tasting the salt on his tongue.

“I didn’t want to tell you but I have to.”

“What is it,” he said. “What do you have to tell me, baby.”

He did not want her to say it. He had known for maybe three weeks, since that morning (it was the morning the pump broke, the Monday after they had gone to Lake Tahoe with Marth and Channing) when he had gotten up and found Lily sitting on the edge of the bathtub, her head down, her arms crossed as if she were having a chill. Her nightgown was down around her waist and a glass of orange juice was spilled on the pink tile floor. Her hands were shaking, her eyes glazed; he knew she had been sick. As he helped her back to bed it occurred to him that she was overdue that month. He was not sure. She had not taken her eyes from his face as he pulled the sheet over her, and while he tried to clean up the orange juice with toilet paper (for some reason he had not wanted to leave it for China Mary to see) he recalled that she had been sick on orange juice the first few months both times before. He had hoped (so fiercely that it was a constant prayer, now after three weeks as automatic as breathing) that he was mistaken, about the one thing if not the other, hoped that she would not say the words. But he had known she would. He had known all along she would wake him some night.
I didn’t want to tell you but I have to
.

He moved his arm beneath her shoulders. Her body was rigid. He would have to let her say it. He was the goddamn priest who would have to hear it.

“I’m pregnant.” Her eyes were shut tight, as if she expected him to hit her. “I’m pregnant and I don’t think by you.”

Her voice was as smooth and anonymous as a recording. She must have rehearsed the words so often that all inflection had been erased. He threw off the sheet and sat up on the edge of the bed, reaching toward the table for a cigarette, stalling less from shock than from a sense of anticlimax. Spoken, the words had lost their power.

Lily had not moved.
Well let her sweat it out
.

“You don’t think by me,” he repeated finally.

She was sobbing convulsively now.

“Any Mexican would know better.” He could hear the flatness in his voice. “Any West End whore.”

“Leave me alone.” She was choking. “Just leave me be.”

“Crystal on your mother’s place would know better. Crystal Gomez. Or whatever her name is.”

He persisted only because he did not know what else to do, and thought she expected it of him.

“What do you want,” she whispered, her head turned away from him. “What do you want me to say.”

“Nothing.” His voice was gentler now. “I don’t want you to say anything at all.”

She sat up suddenly, as if anticipating a trick, suspecting some incipient violence.

“You want to know who it
was,”
she sobbed, almost screaming.

You want to know who it was
. He did not know whether she meant it as question or accusation. Without looking at her, he reached for the shirt and the pair of khaki pants thrown on the chair the night before. He supposed he knew who it was, if it mattered. He would rather it had been a stranger, someone who came and left. For it to have been someone he knew made the fault more subtly Lily’s: she had at once violated several contracts. That kind of thinking, however, did not apply. No kind of thinking that led to the word “contract” could possibly apply to whatever it was between him and Lily. He would prefer that it had been a stranger but it did not matter that it had not been. It might as well have been.

“No,” he said. “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear anything more about it.”

He pulled on the khaki pants and left the room, carrying the shirt and a pair of sneakers. When he dropped one of the sneakers on the stairs he did not bother to pick it up.

Mostly because a light had been left burning on the sun porch, he sat down there on the edge of the rattan couch, one sneaker still in his hand, and wondered how long he had been asleep and how long it would be until dawn.

He sat there the rest of the night, occasionally taking a swallow of bourbon from a bottle left on the table, staring blankly at an album of snapshots Martha had left out. She had been showing their pictures to Channing the night before. (Channing, of course, had missed the point about Martha’s showing him the pictures, had studied a snapshot of Martha on a horse at eleven years old and remarked only upon the resemblance in pose to Elizabeth Taylor in
National Velvet;
had examined the pictures of Martha on the beach at Carmel and been struck not by Martha but by the cypress formations. “They just blow that way, Ryder,” Martha explained again and again with more patience than Everett thought either characteristic or necessary. “They just get blown that way and stick.” It had so irritated and saddened Everett to see Martha spreading out their vacations at Carmel before Channing’s disregard that he had gone upstairs at ten o’clock. “Now, Everett, baby,” Lily had said, that deceptive mildness in her voice, “Martha’s baby pictures do not exactly constitute Mount Rushmore.”)

He saw a snapshot taken on the verandah of the Knight place when they were all children: Lily, he and Marth, and Sarah holding Marth by the hand. It looked like a birthday party but he could not think whose. He remembered one party, perhaps this one, when Martha had become sick from excitement. They had found her huddled in the corner of Edith Knight’s bathtub, the daisy wreath Sarah had made for her wilted and down over one eye. Everett smiled now, seeing that on that day they had all worn navy-blue reefer coats in different sizes. Knight had an identical reefer now; Lily’s mother had bought it.

He wished that he could go upstairs to Lily, tell her it would be all right, brush away the physical fact by making her laugh over the snapshot with the reefer coats.
Red
Rover, Red Rover, let Lily Knight come over
. He could remember how Martha had sometimes kept herself hidden for hours when they played hide-and-go-seek; how Lily, who had never liked being It, had never even liked games much, had sat down under the lilac once and cried because no one would come from hiding and it was getting dark. “I thought you’d all gone and drowned,” she sobbed, hiccuping, when they finally ran in from the dry place under the dock where Martha had insisted on hiding. “I thought you’d fallen in and been caught in a whirlpool.” (The prospect of falling in and being caught in a whirlpool had always loomed impressively in Lily’s imagination; he knew that she believed remotely to this day that whirlpools the size and power of the Maelstrom were commonplace in the Sacramento River.) Somehow that day, he could not recall how, he had made Lily stop crying and laugh. He had intended always to take care of her, to make her laugh. But somewhere they had stopped listening to each other, and so he remained downstairs in a paralysis not of anger but of lassitude and pride.

He had stopped being angry months before, if he had ever been angry at all: had passed through shock, hurt, and compromise already, and alone. Even then he had been hurt not so much by Lily as by his own failure to see.
Have a drink with me, Everett
, Francie Templeton had said the night he finally saw; he had gone up to see Joe about buying a used Ford pickup, but Joe was in town.

“We’ll have a drink together this fine June evening because Everett darling,” Francie said firmly, “it’s about to be one dry summer.”

She emptied an ice tray into a pitcher and picked up a bottle of bourbon. Reluctantly, he followed her upstairs to the terrace of the second-floor landing; women who drank made him uncomfortable under any circumstances, and Francie fell besides into the category of women old enough to know better.

“I so enjoyed
talk
ing to you the other night,” Francie said, dropping ice into two glasses. With an accuracy which surprised him, she threw one cube into the branches of an orange tree which brushed the terrace wall, tearing apart a spider’s web.

“I enjoyed it too, Francie.”

Everett was acutely uncomfortable; in the moonlight flooding the terrace Francie looked even more haggard than she had looked downstairs in the lamplight, and the other night had not been the other night at all, but a month before, on V-E Day, when he had drunk too much at a party down the river. “Walk me down to the water, Everett darling,” Francie had said about midnight that evening, and he had walked with Francie across the lawn and over the levee to the dock, had half-carried her down under the cottonwoods and big oaks and had sat with her there maybe half an hour, singing. Perhaps because he had been drinking as much as she had, Francie’s clear, slight voice did not seem in the least blurred to Everett, and she remembered all the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and even “There’ll Always Be an England,” a song which had always infuriated his father. On that warm May night with the lights on down the river and occasional strains of the
Oklahoma!
score drifting down from the house and Francie’s head on his shoulder, Francie whom he had known all his life, the world had seemed to Everett fine and noble and sweet and brave, a place of infinite possibilities for faith and honor and the grace of commonplace pleasures, and he was moved beyond any expressing of it by the worn words
Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain
. Her shoes off, one foot trailing in the water, Francie had gradually dropped her head into his lap and stopped singing, fading out halfway through “There’ll Be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover.” Thinking her asleep, Everett sat stroking her hair for a few minutes before she sat up abruptly and began to untie the knotted silk halter strap of her dress. “Let’s go in swimming, Everett darling.”