Plains Song (14 page)

Cooking was a chore that had to be done, but it gave Madge little satisfaction, eating being a chore necessary in the performance of duty. Ned ate without comment, his head over his plate, glancing up to look for something that proved missing: Madge read these glances and handed him the salt, the sugar, the syrup, the butter. She had her own breakfast later, when her hands were free. He was fond of his pancakes hot from the griddle, two at a time. She liked to watch him eat. Watching him eat she first saw his long tangled eyelashes. As well as she knew him she wouldn't think of mentioning it. Every man she knew smoked, or
chewed, or both, but Ned did neither. “How come you don't smoke or chew?” she had asked him, the first thing she had liked about him. “I guess I never started up,” he replied. As a carpenter he needed his mouth free to hold nails. He hammered one thumbnail so many times it surprised her it wasn't black. She said to him, “Ned, you got just one pair of hands. You go on like this and you'll have just a half pair.” He startled her by replying, “Which half you like me to pinch you with?” Actually, it wasn't so unlike him to pinch her, but it was not at all like him to say so. If he caught her stooping he might give her rump a slap, or give a flip to her skirts as she passed the table. “Ned Kibbee!” she would say. “What if your mother saw you?” “She prob'ly did,” he replied. “She don't miss much.” Most people were ignorant of the playful side to his nature. Sunday afternoons he would lie on the floor and let Blanche crawl over him looking for his head. He could hide it so well the child would get worried. Playing with her father was the only time she smiled. He could give her hiccups by lowering his head and blowing his hot breath on her belly. “What's she going to think if you keep that up?” Madge joshed him. “She's going to like boys more than girls,” he replied.

Nothing more than that was ever said between them on a subject that went unmentioned. Until Ned had made the comment, Madge had had no idea that he was aware she might have options. Did he know what they were? How had he concealed from her such thoughts as he had? She knew so well what he would say before he spoke up this other Ned Kibbee aroused
and disturbed her. What might he be thinking? Did he think about all of the things that she did? The way they slept together was acceptable to Madge because it took place in the dark, and required no discussion, but her very consciousness quivered to think that he thought about it in the light of day. When he lifted his eyes to glance at her, might it be on his mind? This alerted her to feeling that she possessed, at the root of her nature, something that she should not surrender, and it was a lucky thing for them both that she felt this the keenest when seven months pregnant. So there was no occasion for her to show reluctance where she had been such a willing accomplice.

The winter was a bad one, with the snow drifting to conceal the windows on one side of the house, so that she had to keep the lights burning, and sometimes woke up at night feeling that they had been buried alive. The silence terrified her. She would have to get up and rattle pans around in her kitchen, shivering in the heat from the oven. Ned slept so soundly he didn't miss her. A month before the child was born she decided on the name of Caroline, if it was another girl, or Raymond if it happened to be a boy, choosing it in the hope that a name like Ray would make a boy's life easier. In Madge's judgment, her Uncle Orion had suffered most of his life from the name he'd been given, requiring that people ask him to repeat it and boys his own age make fun of it. Nor had the name Emerson helped her father, a man too solemn to be given a nickname. Only Cora could pronounce it so often and not grow to hate it. Long before she learned
that the name Beulah was a common one among colored people, Madge had grown to dislike it. Fay, Ray, Bess, Les—names that came easily to the tongue were the ones she liked. But Ned had his Aunt Blanche, a favorite, and his sister Caroline Louise, who would look on the new child with more interest if it had her name, and didn't look like Cora. Madge would like a boy for Ned, but she really didn't mind having girls for herself. They would be a help later, and little girls could grow to mean, as she knew, a great deal to each other. Madge could already sense that Blanche would need someone like Sharon to like her, and she would never get from an aggressive little boy what she just might get from her sister. They should be as unalike as Madge and Sharon Rose.

In February Fayrene came in from the farm to help around the house while Madge had her baby. Madge was not quite three years older than Fayrene, but she sometimes felt she could be her mother. What was it that held her up? Fayrene was a willing worker, but Madge was always surprised to find her a good one. If it was something she baked, Madge checked the oven; if it was something she mended, Madge checked the garment. “It wasn't Cora who taught you to mend like that, was it?” Madge said. “No,” she replied. If Madge wanted to know who it was that had taught her, she would have to ask her, “Well, then, who was it?” Four out of five times it would be Mrs. Cullen, the wife of the pastor in Battle Creek. Madge and Sharon Rose hardly knew her to speak to, yet she had taught Fayrene most of what she knew. That could only mean
that Madge and Sharon Rose had been like Siamese twins, as Emerson described them, and gave no thought to Fayrene. Had she stood and watched them? Had Madge or Sharon ever said, “Where's Fayrene?” She had her own room in the house, right off the kitchen, where Cora called “Fayrrrrrrr-een!” as if she lived with Orion. Being so much alone should have made her independent, but instead it made her shy and quiet. Madge could be in a room and fail to notice Fayrene was there. Her bad complexion came on her right at the time she was about to meet boys and get around a little, but the only one she knew worked in the creamery in the Ozarks. He wouldn't lack for girls if it crossed his mind he ought to get married.

Fayrene came into the house on February 8 and on the eleventh Madge had her second child, a chubby, almost blond girl with the close-set eyes of the Kibbees. The birth was not so easy for Madge as the first one, and Dr. Maas recommended—since she had Fayrene to help her—that she stay off her feet and rest for a spell. Madge was strong, but her legs gave her trouble if she spent, as she did, most of the day on her feet. She was a little top-heavy, in Dr. Maas's opinion, and the time she spent at the sink or the ironing board put a strain on her back and knees. If she meant to go on having children—and Dr. Maas took that for granted—she would need to reduce some of the house chores that put a strain on her legs. Dr. Maas was the first to point out to Madge what a strange sort of creature people were in the first place, women especially, obliged to live as they did standing upright, and not
down on all fours like most animals. Madge had never heard talk like that before, and Dr. Maas let her draw her own conclusions. He was a gruff man, with his own problems (his rheumatism was so bad he winced when he shook a thermometer). Madge sometimes detected an unusual odor on his breath. With Fayrene in the house it was possible for Madge to spend more time sitting, but she found it boring. It was her nature to get up and do it herself rather than ask somebody else to do it. One trouble with Dr. Maas's suggestion was that Fayrene was best at cooking but hardly to be trusted with ironing. She couldn't seem to get the knack of ironing the collar of a shirt, or keeping the heat of the iron right for a sheet. She was sweet and patient with Blanche, however, careful with dishes, and like one of Ned's own sisters. She had learned from Cora that something well mended was better than ever. A hole never reappeared where Cora had mended a sock.

Cora's new phone line was down during part of February but she called Madge on Washington's birthday to see if it was back in operation. She had nothing in particular to say, but she did it in a voice that indicated she lacked confidence in the apparatus. Madge used the occasion to talk over with Cora if in the last few weeks she had missed Fayrene. Cora did not especially miss her, but she felt that Emerson and Orion did. Emerson complained about her every day of his life but now that she was away he was restive. She wasn't there to play checkers with him. Orion missed her at meals. Madge said it wouldn't only be a help to her but better for Fayrene to live in Norfork, where
there were more boys and girls her own age and a high school she could walk to. Cora said at her age she ought to be old enough to know her own mind.

Fayrene's own mind told her she would miss everybody—Aunt Cora, Uncle Emerson, Orion, and Blossom, the horse she rode to school when the weather permitted—but she liked living in Norfork, taking care of Blanche, and having her own money. Besides her room and keep, Madge would pay her five dollars a month. That was three dollars more than she had made helping Cora sort her eggs for market, four dollars more than she had made helping Emerson shell his popcorn, and two dollars more than Madge had made when she was her age.

It wasn't necessary for Madge to get up when Ned did, but she would rather do it than lie there awake, listening to the noises in the kitchen. As soon as Ned was out of the house she could go back to bed. With Fayrene taking care of Blanche, Madge could give her attention to little Caroline. The child loved to be fondled. If Madge brought her face up close and blinked her eyes, Caroline would gurgle and squirm with delight. Right off the bat the child knew men from women and was a regular flirt with her father. People do like to fondle a chubby, cunning, soft blond baby, rather than a dark, sober, angular, bony, unsmiling child. They were both Madge's girls, but Caroline got most of her attention, and when she didn't get it she was quick to complain. Madge couldn't punish the child for what she had brought on herself. What she had not foreseen was that a baby so small could be so
jealous. If Ned put her down and picked up Blanche she would have a tantrum. That amused Ned, but it led Madge to wonder if it might not lead to trouble. Of all the things she didn't want in this world it was a spoiled child. It pleased Ned to see how little Caroline would put on a show to win his favor, but he was puzzled and irritated when Madge couldn't stop her whining later. Ned would never believe, nor would Madge bring it up, that a child who couldn't talk could play one of them off against the other. And when she began to see it, it was too late. There was no way she could put pressure on Caroline that was not a concession to her, so that she got her father, or she got her mother, in every showdown with Blanche. No one would believe—how believe in an impression so fleeting—that a child exchanged with its mother a glance of cunning and triumph, as Madge stooped to provide her with what she asked for, or idly fingered the buttons of her blouse. The solemn Blanche would sit there silent, eyeing them both.

The two babies looked so strange together—like similar creatures from different litters, one blond and chubby, the other dark and lean—that Madge let Fayrene push Blanche around in the carriage while she carried Caroline. That way the contrast was not so great.

“Do you like one more than the other?” Ned asked her. This startled her. Was he observing and wondering? She had never imagined he would be that curious.

“I suppose I give the new one more attention,” she replied, not wanting to reveal more of her feelings.
Would that prove to be true of the
next
one? “At least I know what not to do next time,” she said, it pleasing him to hear she was once more pregnant, but it troubled him to hear what she was saying. Madge had given little Caroline more attention, in part because she knew how to demand it, but with her pregnancy she was aware that she gave less of herself than previously. Already she was holding something in reserve for the new child. If Sharon had been with her she might have confessed that it was knowing that that made Caroline so demanding. But Sharon would not have been curious. It had displeased her to learn that most of the weight Madge had put on was not her own.

In June Fayrene went to visit her folks in the Ozarks, and for her own sake Madge hoped she would stay there. If the creamery boy asked her to marry him, that's what she should do. She discussed this with Cora on the day she took the babies out to see their grandparents. In Fayrene's former room, off the kitchen, Orion had installed a water closet, but the bowl wouldn't flush until he got a water tank on the roof. Over Emerson's objection that electric bulbs would upset the chickens and cut down on their laying, Orion had put lights in both of Cora's henhouses, at the door to the cobhouse, and on a pole at the pump. Emerson said it wasn't a farm anymore, but a Christmas tree. He might have had lights instead of lanterns in his barn, but he feared the cows wouldn't like it; if they took a dislike to something it cut down on their milk. Rural electrification was coming to some counties but Emerson wasn't sure he wanted that either,
now that (thanks to Orion) they had their own generator. The less Emerson had to do with government people the better he liked it.

It was unusual for Emerson to talk so much, but he seemed to take a shine to little Caroline, even though she was a girl. Watching him bounce the child on his knee, Madge remembered he had once done the same with her.

He was a comic with the babies, but a solemn owl with everybody else. “Let's see this one here,” he said, picking up Blanche, but the singing and the bouncing didn't amuse her. Her head would rock from side to side but her eyes never left Emerson's face. He confessed to Fayrene it gave him the willies. “Gimme the other one,” he would say to Madge, and pass Blanche, her legs dangling, to Orion. Caroline would squirm and howl if given to Orion, but Blanche would sit picking at the white dog hairs on his blue serge suit. If he made her a face, or blew smoke through his nose, she would watch but never squeal or laugh. In a joshing tone Emerson would say, “That one come with a tongue?” and tickle her in the ribs. Blanche would squirm but she wouldn't giggle. When Madge asked Dr. Maas if Blanche shouldn't be talking, the look he gave her was that she should count her blessings, with Caroline more than ready to talk for them both. It
amused Madge the way Ned liked to fondle Caroline but was taken with Blanche, her owl-eyed silence and sober gaze appealing to something unspoken between them. Ned liked it, but it got on Madge's nerves. So much went into her mouth, and so little came out. The alarm clock on Ned's side of the bed would sometimes not run unless he banged it, and the God's truth was that was sometimes how Madge felt about Blanche. If her head hadn't been so wobbly on her neck, she would have given her a shake.