Plains Song (15 page)

Fayrene came back from the Ozarks two weeks early, with an itchy rash on her arms and backside. It spread to wherever she scratched herself, and proved to be poison oak. Madge had never seen anything spread so fast and look so horrible. They called in Dr. Maas to prescribe for her, and he took Ned aside for a consultation. As unlikely as it seemed, he said, it looked to him like Fayrene was pregnant. Did she know any boys? Here in Norfork she didn't, nor men for that matter, but it was known she was friendly with this boy in the Ozarks, who worked at a creamery in Okie. Well, Dr. Maas said, to both Madge and Ned, she didn't get what she's got from a water fountain. This boy she knew, Avery Dickel by name, was the son of people who were friends with her mother, Ned said, and he took the weekend off to drive to Missouri and speak to them. They didn't believe it either, but when the boy was asked he admitted to it. His parents agreed with Ned that the sooner they made their vows the better, so he came along with Ned on the drive back. He was not just the person Madge would have chosen, but she
was distracted by his joshing manner, as if he didn't know what he had done. Even with the worst over, Fayrene looked so bad Madge couldn't believe she would ever look normal. Her hair had to be cut off while her scalp healed. As a child Madge had wondered what a leper looked like, and now she knew. Avery Dickel himself kidded about her appearance the way he would a dog clipped for the summer. It was probably this quality in Avery that led Fayrene to be so fond of him, as well as his indifference to how she looked. Madge went to great pains not to give Sharon the impression that the marriage was sudden and uncalled for, emphasizing the fact that the poison oak led them to put it off until Sharon could pay them a visit. After all, she
was
her sister, however hard it was for either of them to believe.

Before Lillian Baumann returned from England in September, Madge called long-distance to tell Sharon that Orion had just had a stroke; he couldn't talk, but for him that was not too much of a loss. Mostly, she was calling for Fayrene, who was to be married while she was recovering from poison oak, and at this time in her life, her daddy with a stroke, it would comfort her to see her own sister, her closest next of kin. Sharon was actually so flustered by the long-distance call she agreed to what she heard to keep the call short. Hours later, sleepless, she realized
that Madge had known just what she was doing. She knew that Sharon found Fayrene depressing, with her terrible acne and painful shyness. Nevertheless, Sharon knew she would go, rather than not be there when Cora cried out, “Where is Sharon Rose?”

After a long night in the coach seat, where she huddled like a child, half draped with the topcoat of the conductor, what Sharon saw through the soot-smeared window was like a continent under water. There had been heavy rains; deep ruts fouled the roads, water sat in pools that reflected the sunrise. A sway-backed white horse stood like a specter in a field of corn stubble, its head drooped as if too heavy to support. The dip and rise of the telephone lines, which she had once found so distracting, seemed wearisome and monotonous to her, like the click of the rails. It might have been an abandoned country. Even the towns seemed curiously vacant. It seemed incomprehensible to Sharon that people continued to live in such places. Numbed by the cold, drugged by the heat and the chores, they were more like beasts of the field than people. Where a lamp glowed a woman like Cora would be lighting a fire, setting a table, or gripping the cold handle of a pump, the water rising with the sound of a creature gagged. Only work that could not be finished gave purpose to life.

At the station Ned Kibbee came forward to greet her, flecks of his breakfast at the corners of his mouth. He said, “You have a nice trip?” and carried her bag to a car with side curtains. He avoided her glance, but she felt his pride in the car. Bundles of shingles were
piled in the rear seat. “She's a good girl,” he said, when the motor turned over, “but there's times she's a slow starter.”

“Are cars girls?” Sharon asked. “Why is it a she?”

Ned hadn't thought about it. He appeared to be thinking while he was driving, but he didn't speak. Sharon had never given thought to it herself, but it seemed a good question once it had been asked. “I don't see a girl as a motorcar,” she said. “Do you?”

“You'd see it different if you were a man,” said Ned, and he looked to Sharon for confirmation. The hairy back of the hand he rested on the gearshift was powdered with sawdust the color of corn meal. How different would Sharon see it all if she were a man? She felt a knot of evasion at the center of this casual, seemingly sensible answer. It would have pleased and reassured Madge; why did it displease Sharon?

Ned had spread a bed of gravel over part of the yard, where he parked the car. At the back, work had started on a garage with a peaked roof. A boy, wearing a Sherwin-Williams paint hat, stopped pounding nails to gawk at Sharon. A railing had been added to the porch at the back of the house. At the screen, his shirtsleeves rolled, stood a young man who filled the doorway.

“That's him,” said Ned to Sharon. “That's Avery.”

Avery Dickel, the young man sweet on Fayrene, opened the screen door to let them in. Sharon was either so pretty, so small, or both, that he blocked the door and stared at her, his jaw slack. “You never seen a pretty city girl before?” Ned kidded him, and it
seemed Avery hadn't. Madge cried out, “Will you men let her in?” and they moved to one side. She was on her feet, her hands braced on a chair back, to give support to her swollen figure. “We'll need a larger house,” she said, “if I get any bigger, won't we, Ned?” Ned nodded his head that he thought so. Madge was too big now for the girls to hug each other, but she stooped enough for Sharon to kiss her. A smear of pancake flour whitened one cheek. “This is Avery,” she said, “Fayrene's beau. There's no bed in the house long enough for him. It's a bed Ned has to build them before he does a house!” Avery Dickel flushed the color of Dentyne gum. The feverish color whitened the fuzz on his beardless cheeks. A more oafish youth Sharon had never seen, but he was too undeveloped to be ugly. He had not said a word. Madge said, “Where's Fayrene?” and turned to look for her. Fayrene was at the stove in the kitchen. A barber had clipped her neck at the back, but her hair was in curlers. The sleeves of a new pink robe were turned back on her freckled arms. Sharon saw her face, dimly, through a blue cloud of bacon smoke. “Heavens amighty!” cried Madge. “You let him see you burn bacon like that?”

Fayrene was speechless. They stood together watching her burn the bacon. “Open that window behind her,” said Madge, “to help air it out.”

She went ahead of Sharon, her apron strings dangling, to rinse the sawdust off the soap in the bathroom. “I can't get him to rinse his hands first,” she said, and sorted out the towels to find Sharon a dry
one. Her head wagging, she added, “We've been waiting for this to happen,” and sighed with relief. There was nothing of the misgiving, the disbelief, the dismay, that Sharon had felt at the sight of Avery Dickel. “They can live in Orion's place,” she went on. “Fayrene doesn't mind at all taking care of her daddy. It's going to help her to have a place of her own. She's going to make a good wife.”

There wasn't room for them all at the kitchen table, so they sat in the dining room, flooded with sunlight. Madge spoon-fed Blanche, who sat with her eyes wide, her mouth closed. In order to breathe, Avery Dickel kept his mouth open as he chewed. In profile, Sharon could see that his teeth grew forward, like those of an animal meant to crop grass. It shamed her to feel that something Avery couldn't help would lead her to find him so unattractive. The way he stared at her, as he chewed, upset her less than his unawareness that she was gazing at him.

“Avery works in a creamery,” said Madge, “but he don't like it.”

Fayrene said, “He's going to be an animal doctor.”

“A veter-nary,” said Avery.

Ned said, “That's good business if you stay clear of the dogs and cats.”

“Farm animals a specialty,” said Avery. He stopped eating to enjoy their attention, suck air between his spaced teeth. The sound he made was like that made by Ned when he called the Kibbee cat, Moses, to come and eat or be scratched. A blue Maltese with the tip of his tail gone, Moses went slowly around the table to
look up at Avery, who reached down to stroke him, then scoop him up. With a practiced gesture he curled back the cat's lips, showing his yellow teeth, and using the thumbnail of his right hand, he chipped off flakes of tartar like scales of paint. “See that!” he said, holding the thumb toward Sharon. She was too stunned to react. “They get like that,” he went on, and drew the hand back to look at the chipped particles more closely. Sharon thought she might be sick, and closed her eyes.

“Animals like him,” said Fayrene. Amazingly, the cat did seem to like him. If Ned or Madge had scraped at its teeth they would have been clawed. Avery cleaned his thumbnail on the edge of his chair seat and peered across at Sharon, whose mouth stood open. Was he checking
her
teeth?

Madge said, “Something like that might take time, won't it, Ned? Until they're settled they can live on the farm.”

Ned said, “You needn't farm it, just live on it.”

“Orion did well with his pigs,” said Madge. “If you like animals you can just raise pigs.”

“I don't mind pigs,” replied Avery, “but I don't like 'em.”

“He don't like chickens either,” said Fayrene.

“You won't need any chickens,” said Madge, “if you just look for the eggs laid by Cora's Leghorns. She don't trouble to look for more than she needs now.”

The scraps of food from Avery's plate Fayrene scraped onto her own, as she stacked the dishes.

“Let people finish,” said Madge. “You begin like
that, it's going to be hard for you to stop, you hear me?”

Ned winked at Sharon, said, “I don't plan to get married, so I better get to work. I got work to do.” Sharon stared at him so intently she saw the pupils of his eyes expand, then contract. A fine meal of sawdust powdered his lashes, the creases of the lids. As he arose he took the last swallow of his coffee, walked with the cup and saucer to the sink.

“You let Avery do that,” said Madge, “and you'll never have a meal in peace.” She pushed herself back from the table, tilted forward to rise. “You two sit and get acquainted,” she said to Sharon. “There's no need for you to help.”

Avery leaned on the table, his tongue probing for food above the gumline. In that manner he had of being self-unaware, he stared at Sharon, his head tilted like the dog on the horn of the Victrola. His cheeks were like apples. A snow of dandruff powdered his shoulders. In all her life Sharon could not remember a young man, or a young woman, she found so repugnant. In a mocking tone she asked, “Would you like to be a farmer?”

“I like animals,” he replied. It had not yet crossed his mind to say that animals liked him.

“Then you'd just love farming,” she said, “since everybody on the farm is an animal. It just takes a little time.” He was silent. Did it mean he was pondering what she had said? In the effort of concentration his brows twitched, his right ear wiggled. “I suppose my problem is,” she went on, “that I don't really like
animals enough. I like people better. I don't think they should resemble animals.”

What had come over her? What she had said, however, now that it had been said, seemed so obvious she was pleased to have said it.

“What's so wrong with animals, miss?” he asked.

His calling her “miss” disarmed her. Alone with him, she had been apprehensive he would use her name, as if he knew her.

“Nothing's wrong with
them,
” she said, rising from the table, flushed by what she heard herself saying. He gazed at her with wide-eyed wonder.

“You go take a nap,” said Madge. “There'll be plenty of time to talk later.”

“Excuse me,” Sharon said, and walked through the house to the room at the front, with its unmade bed, the cuckoo clock on the wall to the left of the bureau. It had stopped with the bird popped out of the house, at ten minutes to five.

For a woman so young, Madge moved around like a grazing cow. She heaved herself out of chairs, eased down with a whooshing sigh, propped herself on her arms at the sink or the table, and yet these effortful movements seemed to increase her contentment. She oozed creature comfort. She smelled like a pail of warm milk or sheets dampened for ironing. Unable to stoop, and no room left to her lap, she let Sharon attend to Blanche.

Babies intimidated Sharon, especially this one. She could not rid herself of the impression that her limbs suspended from her head, like a spider's. Scary or
comical faces, loud or strange noises, balloons, dancing lights, or even the water sprinkler (placed on her head so that it sprayed all around her), did not disturb her solemn composure. How like Sharon that was! Sphinx-like, little Blanche would fasten her eyes on Sharon and follow each move, like a bird on a perch. Sharon could feel the child's gaze on the back of her head. The largeness of the head and the thinness of her neck caused her head to lob and roll, as if it might twist off. She had an amazing pallor, disturbing to Madge, but promising a cool, marble-like complexion. Nevertheless, Sharon found it hard to burp the child or change her diapers.