Searching for Caleb (19 page)

   "Why wreck it up adding extra c's and r's?"

   "Because that's how it's spelled."

   "A waste of letters. This language has no logic to it."

   "I can't help that."

   "Why'd you cross out my butterfly paragraph?"

   "In an article on potato blight?"

   "There happened to be a particularly fine great spangled fritillary sitting on the farm agent's shoulder, totally out of season, ignored by everybody, all the way through the lecture. You can't expect me to overlook a thing like that."

   And he would type the article complete and hand it in to the office, where any reference to butterflies was immediately deleted.

   "They have minds like a snake's intestinal tract," Duncan said.

   The fourth week, he attended an amateur musicians' contest. His article that night began very well, describing the contest's history, its sponsors, and the instruments represented. The next paragraph switched suddenly to first person and related his own impromptu entry with a borrowed harmonica, playing "Chattanooga Choo Choo" for which he won fourth prize. In the third paragraph he reflected on the oddity of the word "impromptu," which could easily be mistaken, he said, for the name of some obscure Rumanian composer.

   The newspaper editor said that, actually, they didn't need a new reporter as much as they had thought they would.

   By March, Duncan was becoming restless. Justine was not sure why.

   Everything was going well, six does had been dried off in preparation for their kidding in the spring. But Duncan rattled around the house like a bean in a box, staring out one window after another, starting inventions he didn't finish, sending off to the Department of Agriculture for pamphlets on all sorts of impulsive projects: angora rabbits, fruit trees, popcorn. He painted half the kitchen yellow and then quit. He brought home a carload of rhododendron bushes with their roots balled up in burlap and he planted them all around the yard. "But Duncan," Justine said, "do you think this is the proper time?" They were still wearing overcoats to bed; the ground was still cold and gray. "Why do I have to do everything properly?" he asked. "Don't worry, I've got a green thumb.

   A green hand. I'm a whole green man." And sure enough, the rhododendron took heart and started growing. But Duncan went off and forgot all about it; his strange mood hadn't eased in the least. "To tell the truth, Justine," he said, "this winter business is wearing thin. I imagined we'd be sitting by the stove oiling harness leather or something, but we don't have any harness leather. Don't you feel tired of it all?"

   "No," Justine said.

   She watched, frowning, while he measured the kitchen for some shelves.

   She didn't think he would ever finish them.

   In April eight kids were born, all does. "Did you ever see such luck?

   We've got a whole damn herd," Duncan said. Justine was glad because the bucks would have had to be killed. She spent hours playing with the kids, running across the field so that they would frolic behind her. They kicked up their heels and turned awkward half cartwheels. She set her face next to their muscular little muzzles; their yellow, slashed-looking eyes looked softly back at her. After the first few days they were switched to bottle feedings, and then to milk from a pan, while Justine crouched beside them and stroked their tufted spines. She fed them handfuls of grass to accustom them to solid food, and for most of the day she kept them in her yard. Meanwhile Duncan carried in endless buckets of warm milk, which he filtered and ran through the great silvery separator.

   There was suddenly a stream of customers with indigestion, allergies, or colicky babies, all desperate for goat milk, and the grocery store in Buskville had shown an interest in carrying Duncan's cheeses. "There," said Justine. "I knew it would work out!"

   "Well, yes," Duncan said.

   In May, all the kids died in one night from eating rhododendron leaves.

   Justine wandered around forlornly for days, mourning as if the kids had been human. But all Duncan would say was, "Isn't it peculiar? You would think if rhododendron was poisonous they'd know it."

   "All those lovely little brown soft furry babies," Justine said.

   "But then, goats are fairly intelligent. Are intelligence and instinct inversely related?"

   "At least we have the nannies still," Justine said. "We don't have to start completely over."

   "No."

   "And there'll always be a new batch next year, and I won't let them in the yard at all."

   Duncan picked up her hand. "Justine," he said, "what would you think of getting out of the goat business?"

   "What? Oh, Duncan, you can't quit now. Not after one little setback!"

   "No, that's not the reason. I've been considering this for some time. I mean, there's no challenge to it any more. Besides, it keeps you tied down, you always have to be around at milking time. It makes me feel stuck, I feel so-and I was thinking. You know what I enjoyed most this year? Building that hen house. Putting things together, fixing them up.

   Now Ma's brother Ed has a sort of cabinetworks down in Virginia, making unfinished furniture and so on. If he could take me in-"

   "Virginia? But that's so far. And I never knew you wanted to make cabinets."

   "Well, I do."

   "We're so nice and settled!"

   "But I don't like being settled."

   "And we would never get back to Baltimore. Duncan, I've already gone far enough, I don't want to go farther. I couldn't stand going farther."

   He waited a moment, looking down at her. Then he said, "All right."

   They didn't talk about it again.

   People came filing through Justine's kitchen for advice on their spring problems: love affairs, unexplainable bouts of wistfulness, sudden waves of grief over people and places they had not even thought they liked.

   Justine laid her cards on the rosewood table.

   "It will work out."

   "Just wait through this."

   "You will feel better a week from now."

   Duncan plodded through carrying buckets full of milk.

   He had grown very silent, although if she spoke to him he always answered. He began drinking bourbon at night after supper. He drank from his great-grandfather's crystal stemware. After the second glass his face became radiant and serene and childlike, and he would switch on a lamp in slow motion and start reading paperbacks. The technical books that he usually liked grew a film of dust while he worked his way through a stack of moldy, tattered Westerns the previous tenants had left in the barn.

   Whenever Justine looked over his shoulder stubbled men were drawling threats and cowboys were reaching for their guns.

   "Duncan," Justine said, "wouldn't you like to sit out on the porch with me?"

   "Oh, no thank you. Later, maybe."

   But later he went to bed, moving dreamily through the house, not asking if she were coming too. She sat alone at the kitchen table and shuffled her cards. Then she laid them in rows, idly, as if she were her own client. She yawned and looked to see what had shaped up.

   She saw journeys, upheavals, surprises, new people, luck, crowds, hasty decisions, and unexpected arrivals.

   Which meant, of course, that Madame Olita was right: it was not possible to tell your own fortune.

   All the same, if she had had a client with these cards! She imagined how she would glance at him, interested for the first time, amazed at his quicksilver life after all the stale ones she had seen up till now. She imagined possessing such a future herself, having to consult the cards every day, so much was going on.

   Then it seemed to her that she was not reading her fortune after all, but accepting little square papers that told her what was expected of her next. She had no choice but to stand up, and gather her cards, and wrap them in their piece of silk before she went to the bedroom to wake Duncan.

   This time they moved in a rented truck, which was cheaper than Mayflower.

   They left behind Justine's beloved goats, Duncan's chewed-looking rhododendron bushes and his empty, echoing, beautifully built hen house.

   They took most of the Peck furniture as well as ten years' supply of Bag Balm, which turned out to be excellent for chapped hands. And all the way to Virginia, his truck following behind the apple-green Graham Paige, Duncan studied the back of Justine's head and wondered what was going on in her mind. He knew she hated this move. She had joined up with him, he thought, as easily as taking the hand of someone next to her on a sofa.

   How could she guess that immediately afterward she would be pulled not only off the sofa but also out of the house, out of the city, off to another state, even, clinging fast in bewilderment and asking herself what had happened? And now look: she was so bright and reckless, rattling down the highway, he was reminded of her mother's terrible gaiety at the wedding reception. He knew that sooner or later she was going to break down.

   Yet in Virginia, in their shallow hot apartment above Uncle Ed Hodges's garage, Justine remained cheerful. She hummed as she settled their belongings in-only, perhaps, taking a little less care this time, leaving the damask curtains unhung and giving Aunt Marybelle, without a thought, the huge walnut breakfront when it wouldn't fit through the apartment door. She located a church bazaar, where she told fortunes, and after that there was a steady trickle of clients. To Duncan they were indistinguishable from her Buskville clients-mostly women, faded housewives and very young girls-and their lives were indistinguishable too, and their futures, which even he could have predicted, but Justine was patient and kind with them and it was plain they all loved her. In the afternoons, if she had no readings, she came to the cabinetworks and watched Duncan build things. At first she was shy among the blunt, sawdusty carpenters, but she warmed up after a while. She made friends with them and told fortunes for their wives and kept their children.

   Sometimes she even helped out with the work, sitting on a board for someone or sanding down a tabletop. And always she was so joyous. How long could this last?

   She said she wanted a baby. Duncan didn't. The idea of a family- a closed circle locking him in, some unlucky child whom he would lock in-made him feel desperate. Besides, he was not so sure that it was medically sound.

   Who knew what might be passed on? He pointed out their heredity; heart murmurs, premature births, their grandfather's deafness.

   "But!" Justine said. "Look at our teeth! They're perfect, not a cavity in the lot. Nobody's ever lost one."

   "Justine, if I hear one more word about those goddam teeth-"

   But in the end he gave in. He agreed to a baby the way Justine, he imagined, had agreed to move to Virginia; he assumed it was necessary for her in some way that he would never understand. And all through her pregnancy he tried to take an interest. He listened to the details of every doctor's appointment, he practiced her breathing exercises with her until he grew light-headed. Twice he drove her to Baltimore for over-long visits with the aunts, who fussed and clucked around her while Duncan skulked nearby with his collar turned up and his hands jammed deep in his pockets. It seemed to him that his part in all this was so incidental.

   But when he steeled himself to suggest that she might want to go to Baltimore for the birth as well, Justine turned a sudden level gaze on him and said, "No, thank you. I'll have it here with you." How did her mind work?

   By her seventh month she had started poring over old photographs in the evenings, particularly photographs of her mother. She sat squinting through a magnifying glass, her hard little knot of a stomach straining the faded dress she had worn since she was seventeen. For she hadn't bought any maternity clothes. Was she worried about the expense? In his experience, women shopped. He had expected a frilly layette to mount up in some bureau drawer, but the only things she had were what the aunts gave her. All the preparation she had made was to start building a cradle at the cabinetworks. And when he offered to get her a maternity dress himself her eyes spilled over with tears, something that almost never happened. "But I don't want anything. Nothing is right. I couldn't stand to buy anything in those stores," she said. Duncan was mystified. He did the only thing he could think of: he went out and bought three yards of flowered material and a Simplicity dress pattern. He assumed there was not much difference between reading a pattern and a blueprint; he could figure it out in no time and run it up on Aunt Marybelle's Singer. But when he got home Justine was in labor, and he had to take her straight to the hospital. It occurred to him during the trip that Justine was going to die. He thought he had known that all his life without admitting it: she would die at an early age because the world was so ironic. The sight of her calm face beside him-she was so ignorant!-made him furious. "You are not going to leave me with that baby to raise," he told her, and she turned and looked at him gently, from a distance. "No, of course not," she said.

   She was right, of course. The birth was easy. Justine didn't die, she didn't come close to dying. He had been angry for nothing, and on top of that he had an eighty-five-cent pattern now which would never be used, because he'd be damned if they would ever go through this again.

   Justine wanted to name the baby Margaret Rose, which was fine with him.

   But he was a little surprised. He had expected to have to argue against Caroline, or Lucy or Laura or Sarah, none of which he could stand. How long had Justine's fancy been taken by her runaway grandmother? Who was never mentioned, not ever, except by Sulie, who had loved Margaret Rose since first arriving to work for the Pecks at age thirteen. Certainly their grandfather never spoke of her. Duncan was curious as to what the old man would say now. Would he object? But no, when he came for a visit and they told him (Justine shouting it fearlessly into his good ear, which was turning bad like the other), he only nodded as if it meant nothing. Duncan should have guessed. Justine knew. In that family wrongdoers vanished without a trace, not even a hole to show where they had been.