The Magic of Ordinary Days (5 page)

In the bunkroom, I found Ray's bed made and only a clock, a Bible, and a calendar sitting on the nightstand. In the closet, his clothes sagged off wire hangers—only some clean work shirts, two white shirts, some slacks, and an overcoat. Off to one side I found the brown suit he had worn the day before. Shoved into the corner were the shoes. Only one tie and no jewelry. On top of his dresser, the hat and the cufflinks he'd worn to the station sat above a stack of closed bureau drawers. I touched the top drawer. Inside, among his personal belongings, must be clues as to who this man was.

When we were girls, Abby used to keep a diary. She wrote in it every day, then she wrapped the book with rubber bands and hid it among her clothing in her drawers. I remembered how Bea had complained about it. She couldn't understand why Abby would want to keep anything from us. But later, Bea started hiding letters from her pen pal in Canada, just as Abby had hidden her diary.

Perhaps in these drawers, Ray kept old letters or yearbooks from high school. Perhaps photographs from his younger days. I wrapped my fingers around the drawer's round knob and started to pull. It was so silent I thought I could hear something ticking inside, something like a clock, or maybe a bomb.

I pulled my hand back. What was I doing? Now I stared at the dresser and admonished myself. Whatever these drawers held was private. Certainly I couldn't have fallen this far.

I walked away from the bunkroom and then carried one of the kitchen chairs out to the porch, where I placed it for good viewing. To one side of the barn was a fenced pen holding some hogs, on the other side a pasture for the dairy cows and draft horses. Occasionally a loose chicken squawked and fluttered out the barn doors. A tuxedo-clad magpie who landed on the back of a cow looked as out of place as I did sitting on the porch in one of my school dresses with matching belt and shoes. Soon my eyes began to sting. When I started picking up pebbles on the planks beneath me and flinging them out onto the dirt, without first realizing I was doing it, I stopped myself. Like the Scandinavians, surely I might go insane here, too.

Just before noon, Ray returned carrying a pail of milk and handed over some eggs out of a basket. “Morning.” He glanced over at the clean kitchen and smiled. “How're you?”

“I should have gotten up with you.”

“No need.” He removed an old felt hat and set it on the table. “You got to have rest.”

I wasn't sure why he had returned. “Shall I make lunch?”

He shook his head. “I don't eat midday. Mostly, I'm far off. Unless I got work nearby, I can't come back during the day.” He went to the coffeepot and filled his thermos.

“Are you working nearby today?”

He turned red, even to the ears. I'd never have believed a man could be so bashful. Finally he looked up and nodded.

I took off the apron I'd been wearing. “If you're not too busy, then, would you show me around?”

“You mean the farm?”

“I guess so.” I shrugged. “Or anything else of interest.”

He moved to the icebox and poured the fresh milk into a wide-lipped glass bottle. Then he drew water from the tap. After he gulped down a full glass, he said, “Okay.”

He drove the truck down a narrow road that ran between fields. “We have us a good-size farm.” He glanced my way. “A hundred and sixty acres.”

Ray looked to me as if he wanted my approval. It was wartime, and farming had become an important, crucial industry to feed the country, our troops, and much of the world. Clearly, Ray was proud of what he did, and war needs had raised the status of the family farmer far beyond what it had been during peaceful times, equal at least to that of other businessmen. I remembered one of the government's wartime slogans: “Food will win the war and write the peace.” And a government poster I'd seen at the train station featured a uniformed soldier telling a farmer, “Those overalls are your uniform, bud.”

I watched the fields and irrigation furrows go by and I asked him, “What are your crops?”

Ray gestured out the window at the fields. “Those there are sugar beets.” When I nodded, he said, “Our best crop. We have over half of our acres planted in them.”

“I notice that some of the fields are empty.”

“You bet,” said Ray. “We've already taken the cash crops—green peas, green beans, sweet corn—in June, to get some money coming in. The cucumbers came out in July, the tomatoes in August. We just finished them up. Pretty soon the big work starts up—onions and dry beans. It's almost time.”

“To harvest?”

He nodded. “And after that, we'll take the sugar beets.”

It seemed I had come at the busiest time of the year. “May I help?”

His face drained of expression. “I doubt it.”

I almost laughed. Our situation seemed so absurd. “You're right. I don't know anything about farming.”

After a period of silence, he said, “But you have the house to take care of.”

Ray turned up a wider road, where he picked up speed. The wind started blowing in through the truck window and hitting me full in the face, wind that carried the odor of manure. I scooted over to the center of the bench seat, but as soon as I did, Ray sat taller in the seat and gripped the steering wheel with callused knuckles. Too late I realized I had moved too close. For the remainder of the drive, I could feel his unease.

At first it baffled me. The man was thirty years old. But then I thought of some of the young men I'd known in high school. In the sad hierarchy that ranked persons primarily by looks, I remembered several groups of young men who were both unattractive and terribly shy, who never went out on dates and never got invited to parties. Many of them never got accustomed to contact with girls, and judging by his reactions to me, Ray must have been just like them. In comparison, my social life, although nothing to brag about, had at least given me the opportunity to befriend a few men. In high school and even in college, my girlfriends and I weren't the most popular, but we had our occasional dates and didn't grow up uncomfortable with the opposite sex, either. When we went to the cinema or the ice-skating rink, often a few of the studious guys or a brother or two of one of the girls came along.

Those timid young men in high school had long since graduated and gone into the service. Rumor held that in the Army, innocence was quickly lost. However, Ray apparently had worked away into adulthood, stuck out here on this farm. He was as lost as one of those pimple-faced and innocent boys on a first date back in high school, more self-conscious and jittery than I'd imagined a grown man could be.

I wondered if I should move back next to the window, but then, how would he take that? I didn't know what to do, so I ended up staying penciled in the seat next to Ray. But as we drove through some curves, I made certain I didn't accidentally fall over and brush up against him.

He showed me the bean fields, the onions fields, and finally the “head gates” that brought water from the canals onto his land and down feeder ditches to the crops. “We get our water from the Fort Lyon, the longest canal in Colorado. A hundred and thirteen miles long.”

“Ah,” I said.

We never left Singleton land. We never saw another soul, either. On the way back, Ray started telling me the names of weeds growing along the roadway. Rabbit brush, apparently, had just finished blooming.

Over the next few days, I saw Ray early in the morning before dawn and late in the evening just before sunset, when he arrived back at the house, sweaty and hungry. For dinner, I experimented with baking the beef, pork, and chicken I found in the icebox, fresh meat Ray had swapped with other farmers in the area, and for side dishes I heated cans of vegetables. Eating out of cans was considered most luxurious in those days, but the only fresh vegetables Ray brought in were some of the last tomatoes, so I had little choice. Usually I started my preparations way too early, then I had to let the meal sit and wait on the table until Ray returned. After he tromped in, he headed for the shower first, then sat and silently prayed for long minutes while the food continued to turn older.

During the day, I cleaned the house and swept off the porch. I ironed all the clothes in my closet and refolded my lingerie in the drawers. Outside, the animals snorted and brayed to remind me I wasn't totally alone, but Ray stopped coming back and checking on me midday. The only reading material I had was the
La Junta
Tribune, which came a day late, delivered by the rural mail carriers on the star route. We had no telephone, and no one came to call.

In the evenings, Ray and I ate dinner together at the table. After eating, Ray always took an hour or so to work on farm business. He spread out receipts and ledger books on the table, pondered over them, and scratched down notes with a pencil. After he finished, he shoved everything back into one manila folder, marked simply “1944,” and crammed it inside a kitchen drawer. Afterward, he usually opened his Bible and read a few pages, then we listened to radio programs or worked on making conversation.

After four long days of this, I told him over dinner, “We could stand to stock up on groceries.”

He glanced up between bites of bread. “Sure thing. I'll drive you into town tomorrow.”

“I can drive a car.”

He rumpled the napkin to his face and said, “Sure enough?” But his eyes told me he was uncertain. “Sometimes the clutch on that truck tends to stick.”

“I'll learn how to handle it.” I wanted to pat his hand or his back in the same manner one assures a child, but most certainly he would've crumbled into ash if I'd touched him. “If it would make you feel better, I'll drive with you along first, so you can see for yourself.”

He still looked as if he had just chewed cactus. “Tomorrow, then,” he said.

The next morning, I drove with him in the truck, the “beet box,” as Ray called it, west toward La Junta, where I got my first glimpse of Japanese interns toiling in the fields along the way, their dark hair like ripe blackberries among the greenery.

Ray gestured that way and said, “They're from Camp Amache.”

“But isn't that a long way east of here?”

“The government brings them in, puts them up, so they can work where needed.”

“Will they come to your farm?”

“You mean our farm?”

A second later, I nodded.

“Sure enough.”

We passed through La Junta and drove the paved road south-west all the way to Trinidad. Ray said it had a feed store with the best prices, and therefore justified the farther traveling. But as I was driving, I realized he had chosen the route purposefully. Maybe he wanted to drive all that distance so I could see some variety in terrain, or maybe he wanted me to get a long drive under my belt, or maybe he wanted to observe my driving skills on less-traveled roads. I didn't know or ask why. At any rate, I enjoyed taking the same route that had once been part of the Santa Fe Trail, the path that had brought pioneers, trappers, and traders into the former hunting grounds of roaming bands of Arapaho and Cheyenne. Now the road passed quickly through farmlands that changed to range lands, then through virgin prairie land still not tilled or grazed.

By the time we reached Trinidad, I was used to the stiff clutch and loose steering of Ray's truck. I even backed it into a spot between two others along the former trail, now Main Street.

The town of Trinidad struck me as a conundrum of differences: adobe buildings next to brick Victorians, coal miners among sheep and cattle ranchers, citizens of Mexican descent among Anglos. Cobblestones covered the hilly streets of old downtown not far from the smoothly paved blacktop highway. Without a military base nearby, the town was distinctive for extremes of ages, too. Children ran in and out of the shadows cast by store-fronts, whereas a prevalence of older men and women seemed to thrive inside the shadows, becoming a denser part of the darkness themselves.

“I've read about Trinidad,” I told Ray and handed him back the keys to the ignition. “This is one of the oldest towns in the state.”

Ray headed for the feed store while I headed for the library. I hadn't opened my book on Egypt yet; somehow I couldn't do it here. But I was desperate for something to read.

As I walked the downtown area, I noticed the lack of attention I received. People passing me on the street looked beyond me, as if one sideways glimpse had already told them I didn't belong. During the war, we were taught that anyone could be a spy, even a nice-appearing or pleasant person. Posters everywhere featured Uncle Sam holding a finger to his lips. “Shhh.” Don't give away secrets. “Loose lips sink ships.” The message was on the radio, in the newspapers, and in movies. But as I walked on, I doubted that distrust was the reason I was being ignored in this place. In the city, passersby on the street didn't notice each other, either, but it had to do more with preoccupation and hurriedness. Here, I got the impression that newcomers or visitors simply didn't matter.

I sped up. By the time I reached the library, I was salivating like Pavlov's dog. Inside the door, I paused for a minute, breathing it in. I loved everything about the library, even the smell of dust on the bookshelves. I loved fingering through tight card catalogs, perusing the rows of endless subject matter, lifting books so word-heavy they felt as though they might break my arm. In the local history section, I read up on Trinidad. First a favorite camping spot for nomadic tribes and later mountain men, the town became a stopping point for Conestoga wagons heading south over Raton Pass on the trail to Santa Fe.

When I ran out of reading time, I signed up for a library card and checked out the most detailed local history book I could find, a basic cookbook, and
The Sun Also Rises.
I had read some of Hemingway's later books, but had always intended to read this early one that had made him famous. Now would be my chance.