The Ploughmen: A Novel (21 page)

*   *   *

When he was done he stood back and it was a quaint agrarian pose he struck, the man stropping his face and neck with a bandana and leaning on the spud bar and behind him the slender black boles of the apple trees etched against a sky of splendrous color. He’d dug many such holes but none so fine or so deep. The sod and thin rich topsoil were laid aside in one pile, the stones and gravel he struggled through in another, and with a square-nosed shovel he’d skived the hole’s edges sharp and plumb as though it might be entered in a county fair. It had taken him most of the day and at noon he’d walked back to the house to eat a pear and drink two glasses of water and then had returned to his work, clambering down into the hole with the leaned metal spud bar for support. He encountered rocks the size of men’s heads as he went down and the roots of the apple trees like cables as the hole took its shape and he was forced to chop them away with the short-handled ax he’d brought. In doing so he feared for the life of the trees but he had little choice and hoped finally that the roots would take hold anew when the hole was filled.

He stopped frequently in the course of his endeavors, leaning on the polished shovel handle or on the long metal bar with its spaded end and shaking his head in amused resignation at the ravages of his advancing age. Still, he heaved obdurate stones from the hole that would have given trouble to much younger men and he drew satisfaction from that.

The sun he had welcomed early for its warmth on his face and that had scalded his neck later now threw his long shadow across the hole. He saw a large red stone in a corner of the hole that might cause discomfort to whoever rested there, so he clambered back down and with the long-handled bar prized the intransigent stone from its place where it had lain for ten thousand years and threw it out. Once again at the hole’s edge he assessed it and checked its depth against the length of the bar and declared himself satisfied.

*   *   *

Had she been looking closely she might have seen the piles of fresh soil among the orchard trees but she wasn’t. She had tilted down the car’s rearview mirror as she drove down the lane and seemed to be studying herself in it. John Gload was once again in his chair. He had showered and changed out of his soaked and foul coveralls and shirt and his wet hair was plastered along his head. She swung open the door and stepped out and stood unsteadily before him.

“Now what’d you go and do?” he said.

“I thought it might make your old hag look a little younger.”

“It’s red.”

“Auburn, Johnny.” She pulled a strand of hair in front of her face and looked at it. “You don’t like it,” she said.

“I do like it. I like it quite a little bit.” The chair creaked as he stood up and he took her by the hand. Like a child she allowed herself to be led inside, as she walked woodenly still examining a strand of hair. He said, “You look like a million bucks.”

There was a small short lamp on the table in the modest dining room and in its pool of wan light they ate their dinner wordlessly. Her juice glass held her favorite sweet wine, the color of gasoline. She watched John Gload eat, the fork in his fist like a fork from a child’s tea set. But he was neat and his manners were oddly courtly and she smiled at him over the rim of her glass. Afterward they sat in the chairs at the little table outside the door that Gload favored to read his newspaper. The river rolling in its primordial channel was invisible but clouds lay above it, a pale serpentine parody, kinetic and aswim with gulls. They spoke little and Francie seemed happy to listen to the conversations of small birds from the arbor, and from their cool holes the shrill piping of ground squirrels. The tops of the hills behind the house were softly aflame with scarlet sunset and they watched mule deer walk unalarmed through the conflagration like the prophets of Daniel.

She had refilled her glass after dinner and brought it with her, in her unstable state bearing it before her two-handed like a ciborium. When she drank the last of it and set the glass down her hand trembled. “Oh, my,” she said. Gload had been watching and laid his hand over hers as though warming a young bird fallen from its nest.

“Why don’t you go lay down for a while,” he said. “I’ll take care of that little bit of dishes.”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“Go on. You look wore out.”

“You’re not supposed to say that to a lady.”

He looked into her eyes and they were laced with red, her face with its faded makeup was ashen and the lines beneath her eyes and at the corners of her mouth seemed drawn with ink. “You look tired is all. How’s that?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter.”

He stood at the sink when he’d finished, watching a spring storm form up in the east, newly arrived birds roiling up before the verdigris clouds like autumn leaves. The water ran from the tap and after a long while he noticed it and screwed down the handles and stood once again looking out.

*   *   *

He came from the closet holding it, saying to her in a whisper, “I always liked this on you.” The thin beige draperies rose and riffled on the breeze and the sky framed in the window sash was streaked with distant rain. The room had taken on an odd green cast. He sat in a chair by the bed for some time, watching her sleep and he held across his arms like an offering the green dress he had bought for her one year on a trip to Billings. Storm clouds drug their tentacles across the sageland ten miles to the east but he could smell the rain on the air. As if it grew in a window box he could smell the sage. Then he stood, still watching her, with the bed’s other pillow in his hands.

Her movements under him he thought were not unlike those of their lovemaking, her squirming and bucking and even when she stopped and he pulled the pillow away her face was dreamy, her eyes half-closed as if on the verge of mere gratified sleep or rapture.

Gload removed her clothes and laid them aside—they smelled of the bar, perhaps of other men—and he buttoned on the green dress that had been his favorite, his huge brutal hands fumbling at the buttons and impossible hooks and at an antique collar pin she had treasured. “This makes your eyes look greener,” he said, but he spoke of an image of memory only, as in fact the light was gone from them and what he could see beneath the half-closed papery lids seemed leached of color.

From the bureau he selected one of her handkerchiefs, its edges trimmed in lace. He held it to his nose, folded it neatly, and put it in a rear pocket. He slid his hands beneath her, at neck and knees, and took her up. She weighed nothing. At the hole he bent and laid her in the grass gently as if to prevent waking her and went around to the opposite side and slid down into the cool of the earth. He lifted her once again and laid her down, arranging the folds of the dress around her legs modestly, and he crossed her arms on her chest, thought better of it and laid them beside her in the hole. Raindrops now, like falling coins, rattled through the sage south of the orchard. He touched her cheek, her hair newly red, laid the handkerchief over her face and climbed with difficulty out of the hole for the third time. With the spade he had left there leaned against a tree for that purpose he covered her over, not looking down but working at the two piles with an easy rhythm and listening to his own breathing, to the call of birds among the trees and the rain in earnest then hissing in the branches.

That night he lay on the selfsame bed and called on his dream of plowing, furrowing the ground over and over as the landscape reeled past and kits took his scent and the gulls came. Sleep, though, would not come and so he lay smoking in the dark. He strained to hear above the wind the pong of suspended harrow tines. Rain lashed the windowpanes and muddied the grassless square plot in the apple trees and John Gload imagined a voracious reticulum of roots beneath the orchard plot stirring, then writhing like a nest of snakes and finally, in the damp dark, winning purchase once again in earth, in bones.

The day following was warm and windy and he spent it putting the house in good order. He hosed off his digging tools and hung them in the shed. He aligned her shoes at the bottom of the closet and he washed and hung her clothes. Several times he went down the lane and from various points stood looking into the grove of greening fruit trees, the weave of their wild, untended branches astir with birds. He waited each time to hear the clash of his rustic windchime and then he went slewing back up the road.

He was standing so in the lane two days later with his hands in his rear pockets when he saw the dust of the approaching patrol cars and he went again unhurriedly to his garden chair to wait. Since the brief rains the twisted copse was furred with inchoate green, at his feet the crocuses and breaching tulips, nodding trumpets of the daffodils, yellow beyond yellow in the sun.

FIFTEEN

In later years, and at unexpected times, the thought came to him that it had been a ridiculous place for his life to come apart and it took little more than a linoleum pattern beneath his feet or the jangle of dropped silverware to dizzy him and make his mouth go dry.

He’d gone to the hospital shortly before noontime. In the ICU waiting room he sat across from an elderly woman who held in one sclerous hand a rosary of bloodred beads, covering her eyes with the other as though unable to bear the sight of the world beyond her memories. He’d fallen asleep in the plastic chair with his head lolling and his mouth ajar and he had nearly missed her as she swept through with one arm stuck in the sleeve of an overcoat as though she were going out somewhere. He’d not seen her in two weeks and his heart throbbed at the sight of her. She had grown thinner and her hair was cut in some new way. He asked her to lunch and she stood frozen looking at him with her arm in the coat and then looking for a long moment beyond him and she seemed to be making some kind of decision. She said she did not have much time but that they could eat in the cafeteria. They rode the elevator in silence, Val staring foolishly at her white shoes, at her perfect calves in their nurse’s hose, white as bandages.

He had taken a tray and absently pointed at a stack of grilled cheese sandwiches. She would not eat anything and she chose a table in the center of the crowded cafeteria.

He set the tray down and when they sat he said, “How are things going?”

“They’re going fine.”

He pointed to the coat she had draped over the corner of the table. “Were you going out somewhere for lunch?”

“Not really.”

“Not really? You were or you weren’t.”

“You don’t need to talk to me like that, Val. I’m not one of your perps.”

“That’s not a word anybody says. That’s a TV word.”

“Well, Val, my point is I’m not an investigation.”

“No, it’s just that you were going somewhere because you had your coat so you were going out. I don’t have to be a cop to figure that.”

Her hands were in her lap hidden from him by the table and she stared into them.

“I am so tired of it, Val.”

He looked at her. “If you could tell me what ‘it’ is, I would appreciate it.”

“It,” she said. At the serving line a metal tray was dropped and it clattered on the floor, the silverware skittering. “Struggling. Tired of struggling.”

He studied her across the table. Her hair was a kind of short boy cut and there were streaks of lighter blond in it. In the hollow of her lovely slender neck rested a tiny silver dolphin on a strand of chain, a charm he had not given her and had never seen before and at the sight of it the blood drained from everywhere and seemed to pool cold in the bottom of his stomach. Her words after that fell on his head like blows, forcing his eyes to the floor where he beheld the linoleum’s pattern swimming and blurred.

“We seem to struggle at everything,” she said. “To find the energy to talk. To find time to be who we really are.”

“Riddles. These are just crazy riddles, goddamn it, Glenda.” He swung his eyes up to her face briefly. “I know who I am. But I look at you now and I think maybe you’re finding out you’re somebody else. That you’re making yourself into somebody else.”

“That’s just it exactly, Val. You’ve always known who you were. But I was just a part of you. And I’m seeing that being part of you isn’t enough. It’s not fair to me.”

He was close to weeping in frustration. “I never said anything ever, did I? Jesus. Fair? It wasn’t like I ever said don’t change anything. I wouldn’t have cared about your hair.”

“Christ, Val, it isn’t about my hair.”

With his head bowed he looked to be a man at prayer. His clasped hands as he sought to maintain some grasp on the world were white and the veins in his forearms stood out. But the world became in an instant nothing more than a sphere encompassing the two of them, a metal tray, a tabletop—all else beyond an indiscernible realm without meaning.

“No, not your hair,” he said. “Not about your hair at all but about somebody else, about some other motherfucker.” He stopped and breathed deeply. He stared at the floor. “It’s a doctor, am I correct? And maybe he’s the bwana with all the dead heads in his house and the fucking tasseled shoes. Is he here right now? I’ll bet the fucker’s here right now.” He made a show of looking around the room, though he could have seen nothing at that moment beyond the end of his arm. “It’s like a bad movie, like a movie you’ve seen a hundred times.”

“I didn’t say it was anyone.” Her voice came at him flat and cold.

“But it is.”

There seemed not the slightest bit of shame in her. She looked straight ahead at nothing. She took a breath. “I have been seeing someone.”

He forced himself to raise his head and he wore a look of incredulity. “You’re married to
me.
You can’t be
seeing
someone.”

“Nevertheless.”

The security guard rose with some effort from behind a table where he’d been reading a newspaper. His shirt hung from his distended paunch and as he walked toward them he tucked the tails into the tops of his trousers. He stood beside the table with his hands crossed and resting atop his stomach. Indistinct tattoos on the back of one wrist and above each knuckle. He stood for some time looking from Millimaki to his wife and listening. Finally Millimaki looked up. The man was in his sixties and wore a utility belt hung with keys and a flashlight and a canister of mace.