Pasadena (34 page)

Linda nodded, and then Willis said he’d take her to the kitchen. As they passed Bruder, he stepped out of their way, and the odor of a hardworking man reached Linda and she hesitated but then went on; they would speak later, she thought, when everyone else had gone to bed. And as she entered the ranch house she heard Slaymaker ask Bruder, “She’s doing all right? Do you know what it is?” And Linda realized that they were talking about Rosa, not about her.

The kitchen was dark, and Linda could see only Willis’s outline, but his breath was rapid in her ear. He fumbled for the light and then a bulb dangling on a wire switched on and revealed a gentle, tentative smile upon his face. “It’s wood-burning,” he said. He touched the blue-steel Acme range. He seemed to be apologizing, as if she might have expected something more. But Linda hadn’t expected anything beyond a stove and a sink and a narrow bed and the minutes in the day she would see Bruder. “Be sure to get the boys to deliver wood,” Willis said. “They know it’s their job, but they won’t do it unless you ask.” He turned the faucet. “The water’s fine. The ice wagon comes around in the morning. Bruder won’t help out with that.” And then: “But Hearts and Slaymaker will. They’re good men. I told them to look after you.”

The shelves were stacked with plates and jelly jars and soup pots and ladles on a hook. There was a sack of flour and a tin of sugar and a half-empty pot of honey. “Where do I get the food?”

“Up at the house. Go to the kitchen, and one of the girls will give you your groceries. If Rosa’s feeling better, you’ll see her in the morning.”

Only now did Linda fully understand that she wasn’t cooking for Captain Poore and his sister; no, Linda was nothing more than a ranch-hand cook, and all she would ever see of the mansion was the bolted kitchen door. But she wasn’t disappointed, because it meant that her
days would be spent near Bruder. It occurred to her she might not see Willis Poore again for a long time.

“How do I get back to the house?” she asked.

He looked at Linda with an odd smirk, as if he was reassessing her. “There’s a path up the hill.” And then: “You’ll let me know if you need a hand? If you can’t manage on your own?”

But the hill was steep and she wondered how she’d transport milk and meat for all the hungry men. Was there an extra cart lying around? She wasn’t apprehensive; no, instead she simply wondered how best to do her job. The bulb cast a bell of dim light upon them, and his face appeared even younger than before, but out of the evening chill a warmth kindled beneath his flesh and he smiled, and though she couldn’t interpret it she felt relieved that Captain Willis Poore had come to fetch her: she suddenly imagined the long trip from the station, the trolley ride and then the long walk, and the loneliness that would have mounted within her if she’d had to enter the ranch on her own.

“Your bed’s back here,” he said. He opened a door, and together they peered into a narrow room just big enough for a steel cot and a wood chair with a missing arm. The bed was shoved against a window that looked out to the groves, and she could see the outline of the trees and the early moonlight on the leathery fruit; then she made out the dark shape of a coyote crouching in the orchard, its eyes glowing. The animal howled, and Willis looked at her and said, “I hope this’ll be all right, Miss Stamp. That you’ll be all right.”

Linda felt grateful. “I should thank you,” she said, and he remained in her small, dusty room for another dark moment, and they said nothing, and the scratch and rustle of the ranchland at night came to them and she finally said, “The boys are hungry, Captain Poore. I should get to supper. Is there anything else I should know?”

He hesitated, and she didn’t want him to go just yet, and she wondered if Bruder was noticing the time they were alone together in the house. “I suppose that’s it for tonight,” he said. “But if you need anything, Miss Stamp …”

“I’m sure I’ll be okay.”

“But if you do, I’m just up the hill.” He said something else, and it wouldn’t be until later that night that the words would clarify in her ear.

“Thank you, Captain Poore.”

A veil of disappointment descended over his face, and this somehow
made him appear even more handsome, and she thought of him as the wounded soldier. “This is the last time I’m going to tell you,” he said, moving to leave. “You must agree to call me Willis.”

She felt the pressure within her chest relent. “All right.”

He thanked her. “And from now on I’ll call you Linda.”

The girl had been sick
and they were friends and she had asked for Bruder’s help and he knew that Rosa didn’t have anyone else and he was disappointed in Linda for not understanding. “You promised you would meet me at the station.” To her own dismay, Linda had stamped her foot. “If it hadn’t been for Willis, I would’ve been all alone.”

Bruder had worked at the Rancho Pasadena for more than four years, and he and Willis Poore had come to an agreement. As foreman, Bruder would oversee the growing, picking, and packing operations uninterrupted, and as long as Willis held up his end of the bargain, Bruder would hold up his. The four years had passed slowly, and when the nights blanketed the little valley and Bruder retired to his room in the ranch house with the swallow’s nest in the eave, he would pull his knees up on the bed and read the ancients past midnight, and at the sound of an animal digging or dying outside his window he would look up, and his hardened, lonely face, reflected back in the glass, would startle even him. He had left Linda in order to reunite with her. And after four long years she was at last on the ranch, his ranch.

The orange season ran from November to late March or early April, and during the harvest he was too busy to think of much other than picking a tree clean of fruit, and this had helped his loneliness. But in the long, dry summer months, life at the Pasadena was quiet: Willis and Lolly would spend July and August in Santa Barbara or Balboa, and Bruder would be in charge of the property, and he would have the long blazing days to think about Linda. He liked nothing more than walking the groves and the rose garden in the middle of the night, guided by the
moon, imagining all of it as his—and sharing it with her. He wasn’t a dreamer, simply a man aware of his future. And he hadn’t craved the ranch as a hilltop palace to rule from in isolation; no, he’d imagined it as a place where one day he would bring Linda. But as the years passed, the silence from Condor’s Nest had grown louder and louder until one day Bruder had decided he could no longer wait. He wrote to her, and though he knew at first that she would say no, and that he would have to ask her many times, he had been thunderstruck by his great fortune when Edmund had returned to Condor’s Nest. Many years later, Linda would wonder if Bruder had had something to do with Edmund’s return to the farm, but he did not: it was nothing more mysterious than fate’s turning, clicking dial. And if there was a difference between Linda and Bruder, it was this: he believed in the cruel inevitability of fate; and she believed, even now, that the future was hers to invent.

Bruder recognized his place at the Rancho Pasadena, and knew that his voice held as much authority there as Willis’s. Rarely did he have to demonstrate this—the others sensed it and respected it. A few, mostly the gossips, didn’t like Bruder because he said little beyond his daily recitation of orders; but most were happy to work for him, because if a job was done properly, he left them alone. He made sure that salaries were paid on time and that meals were hot and plentiful. He made sure that thieves went punished and liars were sent away.

The maids in the mansion liked to whisper about Bruder, and he was aware of this. The head maid, a girl by the name of Rosa whose mother had worked at the Pasadena, and died there too, was smart and efficient and could fold two days of work into one, and she and Bruder had become friends. At night they’d sit on a hillside lookout and smoke and talk about their days. Bruder told Rosa about Linda, but Rosa was less open, and perhaps it was her reserve that caused Bruder’s own instinctive reticence to fall away. She had encouraged him to invite Linda to the ranch, and promised to look after her, and together in the streaking dusk of late summer, their faces still warm from the day’s sun, they had made a plan to bring Linda to the ranch. “She’ll come and you’ll be together,” Rosa had assured him, and her clear-sighted optimism ate at Bruder’s hardness, and he posted the first card, affixing the stamps with a summer-dry tongue.

He was thinking of this on Linda’s first night at the ranch, as he watched her through the window. She moved expertly around the kitchen,
and the restlessness that he had recalled in her, and that she had briefly demonstrated with her stamping foot, was no longer there. Bruder saw a serene young woman whose heart had finally quieted from its adolescent pant. He had been right to ask her to the ranch, and he didn’t worry for her, nor for the two of them, and he relaxed with what he thought of as a western sense of relief: that all would work out over time, that things were meant to be.

He had given her a couple of cabbages and several carrots and half a peach pie, and in the cupboard Linda had found a case of canned beef, and with these she prepared her first supper at the Rancho Pasadena. The boys liked to eat outside, holding their hands to the orchard-heater and wrapping themselves in horsehair blankets. They ate their beef and cabbage, and Hearts declared Linda superior to last season’s cook, a gentle-faced man who left town after trouble with one of the packing girls. Slaymaker pulled a flask from his pocket and pushed it to his lips and then handed it to Hearts. He offered it to Linda, too, but she declined, and though she knew that she was supposed to report the men, she also already knew that she would never do it. Hearts and Slaymaker laughed at nothing in particular, and Slaymaker said that he hoped Linda wasn’t like Licorice Lolly. “I’ll bet my last dollar she’s a spy for the city council, ready to report the first drop of bourbon on her ranch.” Bruder insisted that Lolly Poore was no spy, but Slaymaker said he wasn’t so sure, and he pretended his tin plate was a fan and pursed his lips and giggled girlishly, saying in falsetto, “Volstead or death, that’s our motto around here, Mr. Slaymaker! You should try licorice, not liquor, Mr. Slaymaker!”

“If she weren’t so silly,” said Hearts, “some man would come along and marry her and take her away from us.”

“She’s pretty enough to get married,” said Slaymaker. “And God knows she’s rich enough. But the trouble with Lolly is she’s in love with her brother. It’s as plain as a story in the paper.”

“What do you think of her?” Linda asked Bruder.

“I don’t think of her very much.”

“Maybe you should ask what she thinks of Bruder,” said Slaymaker.

Bruder threw a log into the fire pit and said that he didn’t have much to do with Lolly. “I usually talk to Willis.” Slaymaker and Hearts laughed, but Linda would learn that each of them laughed about almost anything, except when a cruel word was said about the other.

“You two know each other from before?” Slaymaker asked, a finger pointing to Bruder and Linda, back and forth. This surprised Linda, for she had assumed that every day since Bruder had left he’d been talking about Condor’s Nest; she had imagined her own myth passing from his lips, embellished but true. Why had she thought this? She didn’t know, except for the simple fact that every day since his departure she had retold herself the story of the boy who had arrived with Dieter from the war.

“I knew her father first.”

“War buddies?”

Bruder’s chin cocked as he thought about this and other things, too many for Linda to guess. He was carving a little whale from a bar of soap, and the thin, long shavings flew into a pile at his feet. “We met in the war.”

“Ah, yes. Captain Poore’s famous Saint-Mihiel.”

“I took it in the thigh in a communication trench at Beaumont-Hamel,” said Slaymaker. “Missed my soldier by a quarter of an inch.”

“Half an inch,” said Hearts.

Linda rolled her hands in her lap. She could feel the blood in her cheeks, and she was looking away from the orchard-heater hoping the others couldn’t detect that she felt out of place. She was determined to fit in; she had always hated it when down at the gutting house the fishermen had teased her with talk of poles and catch and she had wanted to be able to laugh it off but somehow she couldn’t; once, their talk had filled her with such a rage that she had hurled a ten-pound chicken halibut at a boatman, thumping it against his breast. Sometimes the fury would take hold of her and there’d be nothing she could do. “You’re ugly when you’re like that,” Edmund had said years ago. But Pasadena was a new town where no one but Bruder knew her and she could shed the parts of her past that didn’t sit well with her idea of herself. Once she’d overheard a lobsterman say of another man’s wife, “She’s a tough one, that señora,” and Linda had deciphered the compliment in the statement and hoped that one day someone would say the same about her. Already she knew that no one would ever admire her for her delicately crossed ankles or her straight silky hair. No, she wanted to be a woman whom men stood back from and watched with awe. Like Valencia had been. Oh! the night when the guard drops and everything changes! Oh, the night.

Linda asked how long Willis had been running the rancho. About five years, Slaymaker said; maybe less, added Hearts. Hearts was the quiet one, and his shyness suggested that he was the one in the pair who remembered facts more firmly. His ears stuck out from the side of his head like handles on an urn. He squinted when he looked at her, and when she asked if there was something wrong he said that he’d lost his glasses last season and was sure to have enough money for a new pair by the end of harvest. He and Slaymaker had been at the Pasadena since 1919, watching it through the idle months when the blossoms bulged and the whorl of leaves folded inward, forming the early tight knot of fruit. The two of them were Bruder’s deputies in leading the picking teams who arrived each fall, and were responsible for keeping track of each tree’s productivity. During the summer months, Hearts and Slaymaker grew cover crops of vetch or clover down the grove’s alleys—the middles, they called them—plowing them under in September to add humus and nitrogen to the soil.