Red Sky at Morning (25 page)

"Kin to Larry Bemis?" she asked. "I used to go with him when I was at school."

"I declare, Miss Ann, you know everybody worth knowing. I'm sure he must be related. No, must have been related. Buster's airplane got shot down over Hamburg, Dot says."

"Maybe you could go to Quincy and comfort the widow," I put in.

"You get more and more dreadful as you get older, Joshua. If I wasn't so frail I might just take you in hand. Your daddy would thank me for it."

"Sorry," I said, before my mother could tell me to apologize. "I withdraw the suggestion."

Jimbob read some more letters aloud. The war had naturally touched everyone he knew. People were divorced, dead, unsettled, living in strange cities, living different, narrower lives. Each letter came as a surprise to him: the war was an ill-mannered oaf that disturbed his friends and made it harder for him to mooch. All the gentle, well-run establishments had gone through convulsion and turmoil; the guest rooms were closed off, or rented to servicemen; the butlers and gardeners were riveting in shipyards, navigating bombers or swabbing bilge. The whole business was simply too barbaric for words.

"Now here's a possibility," he said. "The Hackenschmidts. I know you've never met them, Miss Ann. They're from Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. I met them in Alexandria, somehow. Clothes, I think. Women's clothes. They're
dying
to see me. Those are her . . . what's her name? Oh, yes. Opal. Heavens! . . . those are Opal's very words. 'Bernie and I are dying to see you again, Mr. Buel.' Bernie! She says, 'It's a pity and a shame you missed the Menomenee Cranberry Harvest Festival, but we're having the TriCities Birchbark Canoe Voyageurs' Race in March, as soon as the ice melts.' The
ice
melts! Stars above!"

"It sounds like a real opportunity to me," I said. "It's a genuine invitation, with no hidden clauses."

"What do you suppose the TriCities are?"

"I've read all about them," I said, "in Geography. Wisconsin Rapids, Nekoosa and Port Edwards. They make paper or something. Full of Scandinavians."

"It's heartbreaking that the Hackenschmidts should be the only ones. I simply can't picture myself in the TriCities. I can tell you just what it's like. Tall timber and people wearing plaid caps and earmuffs. Probably no opera whatsoever."

"Unlike Richmond," I said, "which as everyone knows sends its cast-off tenors to the Met."

"You really are a vile little boy," he said. "Miss Ann, is giving sulphur and molasses still allowed?"

"I'll drink any quantity you can force down me, Mr. Buel," I said, standing up. "I'm ready whenever you are."

"Now stop that, Joshua," my mother said. "Sit down and behave yourself. The war's been particularly hard on Jimbob. His wonderful way of life has just crumbled around his ears."

"You mean, while Dad's out there on a rusty destroyer escort with Germans shooting torpedoes at it, you're weeping about. . . ."

"Now, that's enough!"

Jimbob gave me a wintry smile, the adult equivalent of "Nyaah, nyaah, so there," and went back to his letters. The enthusiastic invitation from Wisconsin Rapids was the only good news he got; nobody else would have him. Thereafter, whenever I brought up the subject of Jimbob finding a home somewhere else, I got a wet-eyed look from Mother.

Sagrado brightens up in the summer, when the tourists and the summer residents come, but the winter there is dead. In the fourth year of the war there was almost no gasoline, and the streets were empty. The plows piled the snow onto the sidewalks—where there were sidewalks; Sagrado didn't have many—and everyone wore boots and stomped through it, packing it down. January and February were one long sixty-day month. Nothing happened. There wasn't even a good fire, although Steenie and I made elaborate plans to burn down Baca's wood yard. We gave it up because we had no getaway car.

The Cloyd girls dropped out of school, and went back to their father's cabin in the
cienega.
Mr. Cloyd lost his insurance suit on a technicality, the paper said. He'd been jaywalking when struck. The girls finally told who was responsible for their condition. It was Bucky Swenson, all right. He'd picked them up in his father's car on his way home from Sunday evening Bible class. Mr. Cloyd turned up at the Swenson's house with his shotgun, but Bucky had joined the Army the day before. Steenie, Marcia and I tried to think of a suitable outrage to celebrate the event, and eventually decided on a six-dollar loving cup, splitting the cost three ways. We had "Father of the Year—Buckminster Swenson" engraved on it at Manx's Jewelry Store, and slipped it into the trophy case alongside Bucky's other awards for basketball, football and track. Ratoncito didn't see it until the president of the school board pointed it out to him. We had another assembly, and an inconclusive lecture on good sportsmanship.

Parker's little sister, Betsy, caught chicken pox and gave it to Parker, who gave it to everyone else. I caught it, too, and passed it happily on to Jimbob, who was sick as a dog for three weeks. It was really the high point of the winter, but it didn't kill him.

Amadeo, grinning like a boy, brought Victoria into Sagrado one Sunday morning in early March. She waved a letter at me, said, "Look look" and kissed me. It was from the Dean of Admissions at the University; she had a scholarship, full tuition, renewable yearly if her grades were high enough.

"What are you kissing me for?" I asked her. "Not that I mind it."

"It was
Don Quixote,"
she said. "I wrote a book review for English—Mrs. Saiz said pick any book we wanted—and I wrote one on
Don Quixote.
Then she sent it to the University without even telling me and said, 'If you don't give Victoria Montoya a scholarship I'll quit teaching high school and be a barmaid.' "

"That must have been some book review," I said. "How long was it?"

"Oh, forty pages or so. It was just the usual junk."

If Yunque High was anything like De Crispin, the usual junk was something like:

TREASURE ISLAND
by Robert Louis Stevenson
My book review is on "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson, which is about this boy named Jim Hawkins who goes out with a bunch of English people named Dr. Livesy and Squire Trelawney to find this treasure, and there's this pirate with them he has a wooden leg named Long John Silver. And Jim hides in this apple barrel and hears the pirates say there going to take the treasure, and they get to the island. I didn't get to finish the whole book because we had only three weeks, but it's a very good book and very exciting. I liked it very much.

I took her into the living room and introduced her to Mother.

"You were just a little girl the last time I saw you, Victoria," she said. "Haven't you gotten pretty!"

"Vicky just won a scholarship," I said. "Smartest girl in the valley; got a head on her like Albert Einstein."

"A scholarship to which school, dear?"

"The University," Victoria said.

"Joshua is going to Harvard." This was a line I'd been getting since the fourth grade. I don't think Harvard knew about it. "That's a wonderful university in Boston."

"I'll believe it when I see it. Come on, Vicky, let's go see a movie. They have one in town that's only two years old."

We saw "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and decided that James Cagney was the greatest American since Tom Paine and Chief Crazy Horse. Vicky told me that Don Carlos had tried to bury a turkey, but the ground was frozen too hard for him to dig. Having agreed about Cagney, we agreed also that Don Carlos was an exceptionally fine dog. I didn't mention that I'd wanted to poison him once.

"You like to hear things like that?" she asked me as we walked through the snow on our way to the house. "You like getting little social notes from the farm? It must seem pretty tame, here in the big city."

"That kind of talk is going to win you no sympathy. All of us city boys long for the countryside. You know; we have that brittle sophistication, cocktail parties every day at school, after Gym. We never look at the tall buildings the way you rubes do; why, I pass Wormser's Dry Goods every day, and never even notice that it's two stories high. But inside, in here, where the heart lies, we long for simple, pastoral pleasures: dogs who bury turkeys and girls who write forty-page essays on Cervantes."

"Río Conejo's a pretty small place," she said. "On Saturday night we all go down to the store and listen to the dogs bark."

"Before the war," I said, "a friend of mine named Steenie told me he used to come down to the Plaza at night and read license plates to see what states the cars came from. One night in August he saw cars from eleven states. It was a big night for him, and he never forgot it."

"Now you're making fun of me."

"Well, why not? You're talking like a dope. Conejo's big enough to get a scholarship from." The sentence didn't sound right. "You know what I mean."

"What's it like in Mobile, Alabama, where you come from?"

"Wet. Hot, except in the winter, when it's nasty. Full of dopes. The only good part is the ocean."

"I've never seen an ocean," she said. "Is it blue?"

"It's the color of the sky, blue, gray or black. Sometimes when it's shallow and running over sand, it's green." I stopped walking, and faced her. "Victoria, what the hell did you say about
Don Quixote
to get a scholarship? I wouldn't mind getting one myself. With my grades, I'll be lucky to get into the University of Alabama, and all you need there is a couple of sworn statements that you're white."

"I just said it was a sad book, instead of a funny book. I mean, it had funny parts in it, but it was mainly sad. I said I thought Mr. Cervantes started out to be funny and changed his mind as he went along. It's the best book I ever read."

We walked up Camino Tuerto, toward the house at the top surrounded by spruce, poplars and fruit trees, all heavy and white with recent snow. The land around the house was always tidy and well cared for; paths were neatly shoveled in winter to the bird-feeding stations and the outbuildings. Amadeo worked hard on it, like a farmer instead of a gardener, and gave it the same careful, knowledgeable attention that he gave his own land in Conejo. We could see warm light through the windows of the house, smoke rising from three of the corner fireplaces. The warmth and good care that shone through the house was Excilda's. It had always been snug and comforting to be the boss's son; even better than that feeling, however, were the people who forgot it, or didn't bring it up, or knocked it out of me with a word, a whap on the behind and a knuckle in the eye. I was never less the boss's son than with Victoria; to her, I think, I was an amiable imbecile with neither brains nor dignity.

"You have the biggest place in Sagrado, you know that?" she asked as we turned up the driveway. "My father says you have almost nine acres up here, right in the town."

"That's what I hear," I said. "It's a big responsibility, too. Don't think being a duke is all fun and games. I have to ride out on the estate every day, beat the serfs, deliver babies in the spring, send around baskets of food at Christmas, collect taxes—I tell you, there's lots of work involved. Sometimes I wish I were one of the common people. Just sit around the cabin laughing and scratching."

"I can see where that might get tiresome," Victoria said. "Do you ever have any trouble with the serfs? Any revolts?"

"They wouldn't dare. When I ride out, there's a full retinue of men-at-arms with me, just aching for trouble. First guy that doesn't tip his hat, one of the troops cleaves him from crown to fork. We use a mace on the children under four."

"Where were your men-at-arms that night up in La Cima? Was it their day off?"

"Now that's an interesting question," I said. "To be quite frank, that episode took place off the estate. The First Law of Primogeniture, sometimes called Salique Law or Napoleonic Code, says if you bring armed troops onto another duke's property, you have to pay Chain Mail Tax or be guilty of Aggravated Tort. It's all there in the Magna Carta. Look it up."

"You were a great-looking duke, down there in the snow with people spitting on you."

"Even dukes have their off moments. Here we are at the castle. If you give the password, they'll lower the portcullis for us. Tonight it's 'Arnold and St. George.' "

"Why don't we just go in?" she said. "It's cold out here."

"You can't just walk into a castle. You have to go through the routine."

"My feet are getting numb."

"It's people like you who make it hard to duke," I said, opening the door. "Are you staying for dinner?"

"Am I invited?"

"I think dukes command rather than invite. I'll have the varlet set another place."

"That's my mother you're talking about," she said.

"That's right," I said. "Sorry. Dukes don't have very good manners."

Mother and Jimbob were pretty decent about having the cook's daughter as a dinner guest. Of course, it was wartime, and prewar rules were suspended. Victoria answered up politely to all questions, even the stupid ones, and Jimbob had trouble keeping his eyes off her. She
was
pretty, no doubt about it. When Jimbob and my mother began to talk about their families—it was a social disease they both had, irritating, but not catching—Victoria listened attentively and said the right things: "Isn't that interesting!" and "My, my!" and "I hadn't known that before!" and "Imagine!" There had been Devereaux on hand to help Oglethorpe settle Georgia ("You know where Georgia is, don't you, dear?") and a Buel had operated an early commercial venture at Jamestown. "In sixteen-seven, if you can imagine it," Jimbob said. "Quite a while ago."

"Has your family been in America long, dear?" my mother asked her condescendingly.

"Not too long, Mrs. Arnold," Victoria answered. "By America do you mean what's now Mexico or what's now the United States?"

"Well, I suppose I mean here. Around Sagrado."

"I'll have to figure it out in my head," Victoria said. She closed an eye and mumbled something like, "Eight from fifteen, seven, borrow one," and announced, "Three hundred and forty-seven. No, forty-six. They came in August."