The Magic of Ordinary Days (16 page)

“Then do so, Mrs. Singleton.” He picked up his pen and tapped it once on the desktop. “I've cared for others in your situation, and many times the babies turn out to be some of the most loved of them all.”

For a few minutes, we sat in silence. Then he asked, “Any questions?”

When I shook my head, he slipped the pen into his chest pocket. “Then we'll give you a booklet to read, and we'll see you in a month.” He rose from his chair. “See you out?”

As Ray and I later walked down the sidewalk, he asked, “Everything go okay?”

I looked at all the people bustling by on the sidewalk. Groups of soldiers, married couples, children. “Everything's right on schedule.”

“Did he tell you when the baby's coming?”

“March,” I replied, then looked his way. “I could have told you that before.”

Ray led me to the truck. He opened my door and helped me in. Then he walked around, slid in himself, and sat focusing out the windshield. “I guess I couldn't ask you before. I could see it hurts you.” He glanced my way. “Salt in a wound, you know.”

I'd been thinking lately of the pyramids, not the ones in Egypt, but the ones closer by in Mexico. The ancient civilizations of Mexico had been much more advanced than what early explorers ever realized. The Mayans and their culture were some of the most mysterious and misunderstood. And the ruins of their cities often perched on rises overlooking blue-green seas and surrounded by big-leaf jungles holding parrots in the trees.

I said, “It can't be changed.”

Ray seemed reluctant to start driving, as if he had more to say or to hear. After almost two months together, he was finally breaking out of his shyness around me. And I decided that he might as well hear thoughts from the darkest corners of me, this woman he thought he loved. “Early on, I kept praying to lose the baby.”

He didn't move in the seat. Even his hands were motionless on the steering wheel. “But then, you wouldn't have come here.”

Of course, I wouldn't have. Because of Mother's illness, I had missed my summer classes, but by the end of the fall term, I would've caught up again. I would've finished my master's degree and started planning field studies. “People will notice, Ray. People will notice that the baby is early. What will they think then?”

“I don't care what people think.”

“That's impossible,” I said. Why did people pretend to be immune? “Everyone cares. The child was conceived before we were married. Soon that will be apparent to everyone. People judge, people gossip.” I stopped. “Even here.”

“They won't say anything.”

I turned away. “How do you know?”

“I lived here my whole life. Trust me. No one will say anything to you.”

I wanted to understand. “Out of respect to your family?”

“Something like that.” I heard him take a big breath and felt him look my way. “Livvy,” he said, “when Reverend Case got that call from your father, he could've picked any number of ole bachelors living out here on their own. But he picked me.” Now he whispered the words, “This is the best thing to ever happen to me.”

I fought back the sting of fresh tears. At first this whole scheme of Father's seemed as if it would hurt only me. I hadn't planned to hurt anyone else. When Father said I would marry a bean farmer, I was in such a state of worry for my own self, I couldn't imagine any of the consequences. I'd never even pictured a real person, a real family, not until I arrived here. My own pain was acceptable, but the pain I was causing Ray was too awful to face.

Closing my eyes, I said, “Ray, I don't know what this is.”

I could barely hear him say, “It's a beginning.”

Then I started sneezing and couldn't stop until my head felt as if it would blow right off of my shoulders. After that, Ray drove us away, and we didn't talk about it anymore. But by that night, any reserve I had left started to crumble away. My own selfishness at accepting Father's plan, such an easy way out and at others' expense, ate at me like termites in the marrow. After midnight, I was still listening to the clock ticking on my nightstand, and from miles away I heard a train whistle calling out like a lure, telling all of us lost souls to jump on board and run away.

Perhaps the sterile conditions of the physician's office had sent the visions flying back to me. As I lay there, I remembered back to the days in May when I had to put Mother to bed for the last time, and how Father had found so much church work of dire importance to do that he left Mother to suffer out her last days on her own, alone except for me. I was the one who learned to inject the morphine that would relieve her pain. I was the one who got up with her in the night. I cleaned and cared for her while he went about his business caring for others and not his own.

Mother appreciated every last thing I did for her. But she never ceased longing for Father's company. Sometimes she would startle herself awake, having heard some noise, real or imaginary, that came from within the house. Then she would whisper to me, “Is your father here?” And I would have to tell her that no, he wasn't. Abby and Bea made time to come and spend hours during the day with her, holding her hand or trying to feed her soup or pudding, but Father, for all good purposes, vanished before our very eyes.

On one of her last days, she asked me to take her outside in the garden where she could feel wind and sunshine on her skin. I carried her brittle cage of a body and set her on a cushioned chair among the flowers. Mother was dying in May, when the irises were blooming. Irises, which took their name from the Greek goddess of the rainbow, whose duty it was to lead the souls of dead women to paradise.

A moan came out of my throat, startling me awake. I hadn't realized I was dreaming, hadn't even realized I'd fallen asleep. In my dream, Mother was in the arms of the goddess of the rainbow, flying off to heaven, but something had gone wrong, and then she was falling, falling down to earth with no one there to catch her. I could still see the speck of her, so insignificant against a huge yellow sky. A snivel of pain escaped out of me.

Ray was in the room. I could see his shadow in the moonlight that shafted in from the window. “Are you okay?” he whispered.

“Yes,” I answered.

Then I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and pretended to go back to sleep. Instead, within the dark closet of my closed lids, I listened to him breathing. I expected him to turn around and leave, but for reasons I couldn't imagine, he stayed in the doorway and watched over me for a long time.

Sixteen

In mid-October, while General MacArthur was in the midst of battle for the Philippines, several visitors dropped by to look at the antiques. Some of them held private collections, and others gathered for the historical society or for local museums. I let my visitors select and take anything they found useful. I also offered refreshments, and we chatted on the porch if weather allowed, sharing thoughts about the history of the area. Most of my visitors were friendly enough, but I noticed fairly soon that conversation beyond niceties was out of the question. I also found it interesting that few people mentioned my obvious pregnancy. Every day now, I wore maternity clothes, and there could be no doubt as to my condition, but most people chose to ignore it. Speaking of pregnancy acknowledged that women were sexual beings, after all. I was reminded of the Spanish word for pregnant,
embarazada,
meaning embarrassed.

I received only a few shy congratulations, and one woman offered to host a baby shower for me as the date drew nearer. Lingering on the porch sipping lemonade, she had said, “We could hold it at the church or at my home, whatever you prefer.”

It was a gracious offer, but to my surprise, I found no relief from my loneliness. Perhaps I even felt worse, even more disconnected. I said, “Perhaps the church would be more convenient.”

She looked relieved. “Yes, probably.”

I was experiencing the strangest mix of feelings. Treated with instant respect because I had married into one of the old-generation farming families, I found myself wanting to scream at her, to shout out the truth. I'd become a woman who dreamed of yelling at people who didn't even know how infuriating I found them.

One day during the sugar beet harvest, Ray came back in the middle of the day, which startled me. I knew something had to be wrong. He had with him a middle-aged male Japanese intern who had a piece of cloth wrapped around his left hand. Through the cloth, I could see blood. Ray quickly explained to me that the man had cut himself while chopping off the top of a sugar beet and that we needed to drive him to Santa Fe Hospital in La Junta to see a doctor. “He's going to need stitches,” Ray said to me.

The man smiled at me and bowed. He had leathery, tanned skin that furrowed away from his eyes as he smiled, and he wore suspenders over a work shirt, scuffed pants, and scarred shoes.

I untied my apron strings and grabbed my handbag off the counter. “I can drive him over.”

Ray looked relieved. “That'd be great. Then I can get back to the fields and make sure nothing else happens.”

I led the man to the truck, got him settled inside, and drove us off. On the way I found out that the gentleman spoke only broken English. But he spoke the language better than he understood it. We managed to carry on a conversation anyway, and I learned that he had been a farmer in Sonoma County, California, that he had arrived here with his wife and three sons via the Merced Assembly Center, that his sons were in junior high and high school, that he hoped to return to his farm at war's end.

I checked him in at the emergency room and filled out the needed papers, naming Ray and me as the responsible parties. I waited while he had his hand stitched up and wondered how much instruction he had been given in how to handle the beet knife. He had been so pleasant with me, not bitter in the least. At the end of the day, when I returned him to the horse barn, he thanked me and said haltingly, “Be back soon.”

“Oh, no,” I told him. “You must return to Camp Amache. No more work until that hand is healed.”

He bowed and smiled out to both ears.

“Promise?”

I'm not sure he understood what I was saying, but he pretended he could. He backed away and I returned home in hopes that I wouldn't see him again on the farm.

At the same time as the sugar beet harvest progressed, overseas, in the battle for the Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, the U.S. Navy claimed victory in the greatest sea battle in history. On the last day of sea fighting off Leyte, however, a new and terrifying warfare tactic was introduced by the Japanese, the kamikaze. From the Japanese word for “divine wind,” the kamikazes, a special group of suicide pilots, purposefully crashed their planes into American carriers and battleships.

The news came in, announced on the evening radio news just after sundown. At the kitchen table, I was reading A
Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
and Ray was working on receipts for farm supplies. As the announcement came, we looked up from our work and listened.

I had never heard of such a thing in all my previous years of studying history. Unfortunately, humankind has almost constantly been at war, and always there have been those who stood at the front line. In the awful pecking order of battle, the soldiers first to charge surely must have known their chances of survival were not good. But never had I heard of such calculated suicide missions as that of the kamikaze. Never had I heard of such deliberate sacrifice of a life, and now armed with the machines of modern days, one person bent on suicide was capable of causing the large-scale death of others as never before. Ray and I listened to the long report. The kamikaze had flown into the flight deck of one of our carriers, the
St.-Lo,
causing it to blow up and then sink.

I had made a custard pudding for dessert, but after the news, neither of us felt like trying it. Instead, as the station switched to playing some music, I told Ray, “I need to walk.”

“Don't go far,” he said.

I bundled up in my overcoat, but at the door, I turned back. “Would you like to come?”

He sat up; then, pushing the receipts aside, he said, “Sure.”

Outside, the night air was cold as we walked swiftly in the direction of the bridge. In the creekbed, a tiny trickle of clear water flowed, evidence of recent rain, and ice formed along the bank edges. Low clouds obscured the moon and stars, making the night sky as dark as India ink. Only when lightning lit up distant portions of the sky could we see the rolling undersides of the storm clouds, like smoke from a blue-black fire.

On the bridge, I said, “What a night sky,” to Ray as I looked up.

He said, “It'd be even colder without those clouds.”