Moving On (7 page)

He came in shortly and turned on the overhead light—there was no other. The room was still a little dusty from long disuse, and there was nothing in it but a straight chair, a bed, and an old brown bureau. The wallpaper had once been green but was faded almost gray and was blotchy on the ceiling. The light shone right in Patsy’s eyes and she hid under the sheet until Jim noticed and switched it off again.

“I guess people never read in this country,” she said. “They haven’t heard about bed lights.”

Jim was standing by the open window. A light drizzle had started up again and he stood listening to it. “I ought to get those films ready to mail,” he said. “I want to get them off first thing in the morning.”

“Please do it in the morning. It’s nice in here dark, and awful when you turn the light on.”

Without answering, he came and stretched out on the bed, close against her, his body cool for a second. “Anyway, I bet you surprised him,” he said. “He’s probably not used to girls jumping out of his hearse.”

“I’m not used to sitting in sluck, either,” she said. “At least not in other people’s.”

Jim kissed her lightly on the shoulder. “Saint Patsy,” he said. “Prude and martyr.” He yawned and rubbed his forehead against her shoulder. “Maybe you aren’t going to like being a photographer’s wife.”

She lay facing away from him, on her side, and he reached one hand across her as if to touch her loins but then rested the hand on her hip instead. In two or three minutes he was sleeping, and the drizzle and the sounds of Jim’s breathing were the only sounds she heard. She fitted her back and legs against his body and soon felt warm and relaxed. She loved to listen to the rain. She drew Jim’s arm across her and held it beneath her breasts. Often she felt closest to him just after he had gone to sleep, especially if he went to sleep at a time when she wanted quiet rather than talk. The rain made a lovely sound and a lovely smell, and as she became more content she became more wakeful. She would have liked to read, but there was no bed light.

After a time she slept, but not very long. When she woke it was still dark outside. She could never sleep long or deeply in strange beds. Jim had turned over, so that only the curves of their backs were touching. Patsy felt sure morning couldn’t be far away, and she got up and put on her robe and tiptoed down the cool bare-floored hall to the bathroom. Her hair felt gritty from two nights of rodeo, and it seemed a good enough time to wash it.

The bathtub was old, narrow, and deep, with some of the enamel chipped off around the edges. The water pressure was very low, only a strong dribble, and she knew from the previous day’s experience that it would take a good thirty minutes for the tub to fill to the level she liked. She left the water running and slipped back through the dust-scented hall to the bedroom and got herself a book and tiptoed down the cool stairs to the kitchen. In the darkness the kitchen smelled of oilcloth and linoleum and the strong gray soap that Uncle Roger used at the sink. She turned on the light, got a glass of water, and made herself a peanut butter sandwich. There had been no peanut butter on hand when they arrived, so she had bought some in Vernon for just such an emergency. The kitchen window was open; through it she could hear the squabblings of chickens. She was reading
Incidents of Travel in Yucatan
, a good book to read but annoying because the pages wouldn’t stay open. She had been reading it at intervals for a month and was sixty pages into Volume II. She tried setting the peanut butter jar on the top margins, but that didn’t work very well, so she gobbled her sandwich and then read, picking up crumbs with her fingertips and eating them. When she went back upstairs the bath was still not ready and she sat on the toilet and read until it was. She stuck the book in a closet on top of some towels, assembled her shampoo and several bath brushes, got in and soaked, scrubbed her knees and toes and back, soaked some more, washed her hair, and soaked still more, the wet ends of her hair dripping streams of water onto her chest and shoulders. Given half a chance she could bathe for an hour.

While she was drying herself she heard Roger Wagonner pass the door and go downstairs. The mirror over the lavatory was small and not very helpful, and she went back to the bedroom to attend to her hair.

Jim was sleeping soundly, his body curled toward the part of the bed where she had been. His shoulders were goose-pimpled by the morning coolness. Patsy pulled the sheet up over him and sat on the bed for a minute rubbing his shoulders until the goose bumps went away. He had not shaved the day before and in the gray early light she could see, when she bent over him, the line of light blond whiskers on his jaw, the same color as the light hairs on his chest. For some reason Jim took on authority when he slept; it was then that he seemed most like the man that she wanted him to be, and she felt respectful of him and pulled the sheet a little higher before she got up.

She went and sat by the window in the straight spindly brown chair, rubbing her hair with a towel. Outside, a cow was bawling at intervals, and in a few minutes Patsy saw her trailing slowly toward the barn. She was a small Jersey, and the calf that trotted after her was incongruously large and red. Uncle Roger had explained to her that the calf was adopted, and not the result of any irregular behavior on the cow’s part. The country smelled cool and wet. The sky was quite clear, and a white moon, already fading slightly, hung high in the southwest.

Patsy concluded that they were right, those people who said dawn was as lovely as evening. She had never been awake so early, and the few times she had been up early at all she had been going someplace and had had to dash or drag around, hunting clothes and stockings and cosmetics, and it had not been pleasant. But she was there, and settled, and clean and wide awake, and had a book to read and a husband sleeping nearby and her hair to dry in its own time, and the morning seemed beautiful. The sun was up, she could tell, but the window where she sat was on the west side of the house and the sun was still low in the east. After a while its rays began to touch the green mesquite trees on the slope south of the house and to touch the wet grass. The damp ground had begun to give up a little mist. She used a dryer when at home, but since she wasn’t at home she rubbed her hair vigorously with the towel from time to time, examining the ends closely to see if they were splitting.

In a few minutes she heard Roger Wagonner slam the back door and saw him walk through the yard, his milk bucket over his arm. Their green Ford was parked by the back gate. He glanced at it with the curious unbelieving glance people always gave the Ford, as if he was pained and amazed that such a vehicle had been removed from the junkyard where it belonged and parked on his property. The Ford was six years old. Jim had had it four years before they were married. They could easily afford another car, but Jim was sentimental about the Ford and stubbornly refused to sell it. They had discovered each other in the car, and he had got it bound up with their love in some way. They spent their first full night together parked in the Ford on a hill near White Rock Lake, in Dallas, kissing and talking. Patsy was misty enough about the night herself, but not so misty about the Ford that she could ignore the fact that it was falling apart. Only the month before they had been stranded for six hours in a garage in Riley, Texas, with a broken timing gear. “Are we going to keep it all our lives?” she had asked then. She read three magazines and all of
Pnin
while the Ford sat in a blackened garage full of oilcans. Jim ignored her and talked to the mechanic. “Look, I married you for life,” she said, trying again, once they were on their way back to Dallas. “If we’re going to keep this car as our hearts’ museum or something, we might as well have it bronzed.”

“I fell in love with you in this car,” he said, not impressed with her wit; and they continued to drive it.

The chickens came out to meet Roger, the hens scolding bitterly, and he clucked them out of the way and walked on to the barn through the milky shin-high mist. His pickup was parked between the chicken house and the barn, an ancient Chevrolet twice as old as the Ford, with sideboards that had not been painted in so long that they were gray.

He called to the milk cow and let her and the red calf into the barn. The sun was burning the mist away. When he emerged from the barn he had a full bucket of milk and set it carefully on a wheelbarrow near the lot. He filled a hayrack with yellow hay and got his milk bucket and carried it slowly to the house.

Patsy felt talkative. She laid her book and comb on the window-sill, belted her blue robe about her, and skipped quickly down the stairs to meet him.

“Hi,” she said. “So this is what morning’s like. Want me to help you with breakfast?”

Roger was a tall old man, with hair thin and quite white and so molded to his temples by years of being beneath the same hat that it stayed molded even when he took the hat off.

“Sure, start helping,” he said. He set the heavy milk bucket on the smooth blanched wood of the drain-board. Patsy had watched him strain it through some cheesecloth into a strainer only the evening before, and she determined that straining the milk would be her first rural task. She began to open drawers at random, looking for the cheesecloth.

Roger became nervous as she rapidly progressed through the drawers. He got the cheesecloth, which hung on a towel rack over the sink. “You’re an energetic creature, Patsy,” he said. “Don’t you have no shoes? You been here two days now and I ain’t seen you with shoes on yet.”

Patsy was busy reopening the drawers he had just closed, as she had in mind cooking bacon and wanted a fork to turn it with. She noticed that he was watching her as if he expected to have the entire contents of his cabinets dumped on the kitchen floor, and actually a good number of implements
were
scattered on the drain-board, but she intended to put them back as soon as she had a chance. The blue milk strainer, an antique almost, stood on the back porch. She held the cheesecloth between her teeth and used both hands to carry the milk bucket out there. How she was going to affix the cheesecloth and pour too she didn’t know, and Roger Wagonner didn’t know either. Whatever he envisioned her doing made him so nervous that he undiplomatically took the bucket and strained the milk himself while she went back and started the bacon frying.

“You don’t trust me,” she said. “You’re perfectly right not to. I don’t know why I think I’m a milkmaid, but it seems a lovely thing to be on a morning like this. I guess I must have read about milkmaids. Thomas Hardy has them in numerous books and they’re always at their best on mornings like this. If we’re going to have biscuits you’ll have to make them and I’ll do the oven part. I’ve never made biscuits from scratch.”

Watching her wandering about the kitchen in her blue robe, standing on one foot now and then to scratch her bare calf with a toe, Roger Wagonner shook his head and resigned himself with a smile to the chaos females bring to an orderly house. Patsy fried the bacon but then sat down at the table to peel an orange and eat it, dropping the peel and in time each seed on a white napkin spread on the checkered oilcloth. She talked all the while of the mist and the milk cow and this and that, and Roger fixed the biscuits and fried four eggs hard as stones and got the breakfast around her. It was not until he bent over stiffly and slowly to peer into the oven at the browning biscuits, and the hip pocket of his faded Levi’s came into her vision, that Patsy remembered she had been going to cook.

“Oh, dear,” she said, blushing and jumping up. She ran to the cabinet and looked desperately for something to do, but he had even put the plates on the table while she was chattering.

“I’m terrible,” she said. “You have every right to be suspicious of me. I’m completely impractical.”

“Now quit apologizin’ and let’s eat,” he said, sitting down. He wore a clean brown khaki work shirt with the cuffs turned up. The hair on his wrists was as white as the hair on his head, but his wrists were strong-looking, old as he was. He cut through his eggs diagonally. They had been fried in bacon grease and the outsides were brown.

“I guess I’m a shade nervous,” he said. “Haven’t had to cope with a female in this kitchen in the morning for eleven years. That’s how long it’s been since Mary got killed.”

He said the last merely as one states a fact, with no self-pity or nostalgia. Patsy could not understand how he could eat eggs fried so hard.

“How come you fry them that way?” she asked.

“Because it don’t take no talent. You just leave ’em in the frying pan till they’re hard enough to bounce.”

The coffee stopped perking at just that time and Patsy noticed and jumped up before Roger could even scoot back his chair. She poured them cups. The cups were white and thick and had little thin cracks running down their sides. Roger immediately poured half of his coffee into a saucer. His food was already gone. He tilted his chair back, the saucer in one hand, and began to blow on the coffee gently and sip it as it steamed.

“Mary never went barefooted that I can remember,” he said, still more thoughtful than nostalgic.

“Apparently ladies didn’t in earlier days,” Patsy said, contemplating the two brown eggs that seemed to be her responsibility. The peanut butter, the orange, and a sliver of bacon had filled her completely and she was nervous about the eggs. She had heard that in the country food was never wasted.

“Where you and Jim going next?”

“Phoenix.”

“Going in that car?”

“Sure.” She felt suddenly loyal to the Ford. She cut a little corner off one egg to see what the yolk of an egg looked like when it was fried that hard. “It’s our only car. Your pickup is older than it is and you still drive it, don’t you?”

“Well, naturally,” Roger said. “No use buying nothin’ new at my age. I don’t go out tourin’ the world in it, though. Besides, I’m pore. If old Jim’s gonna haul you all over the country he oughta buy you a better automobile than that. He can afford it. You could probably even get a pair of shoes out of him if you sweet-talked him a little.”