The Promise (21 page)

‘Miss Nan,’ he pleaded.

She shook her head. He edged away from her, his chin down, and she returned to her work, her iron thumping over the small shirt spread out on the board. Something was wrong with Nan, I thought. This coldness toward Andre wasn’t like her. There were shadows under her eyes, and she was pale as if she were ill. I went into the kitchen and put my hand out to Andre. ‘Come with me,’ I said. ‘I have a treat for you.’

‘You do?’ he said.

‘Most certainly.’ I glanced at Nan as Andre took my hand, and if she appreciated my help, she hid it well. Her attention was fixed on her work as if I were not in the room. ‘How about a piano lesson?’ I said to Andre.

‘Daddy said I couldn’t touch it. He said it’s not a toy.’

‘And he’s right. But this will be a lesson and that’s different.’

‘Like school?’

‘Like school. Except the upright is our desk. Now. Let’s give it a try.’

That evening Oscar and I lay together and talked, our voices low. ‘You’ll get used to it here,’ he said. ‘Just give it time. It took me a while, the heat and all. But then again maybe it was different for me. I hadn’t figured on staying. I came by accident, you might say.’ My head was on his shoulder and beneath the palm of my hand, I felt the beat of his heart.

‘By accident?’ I said.

‘Hadn’t meant to come here. I was on my way to south Texas, looking to hire on at a ranch down there. Had two winters up in the Panhandle and that was enough.’

The slight drawl in his voice was smooth, and the mosquito netting rippled, the night air cooling us. The rain had stopped hours ago. ‘Took the train over to Dallas and then on down to Houston,’ he said. ‘Met all kinds of folks along the way. One fellow talked about Galveston, about the cotton exchange, and how ships came here from all over the world. I’d never seen an ocean, couldn’t even get an angle on it. When I got to Houston, I figured I’d come to Galveston just for the doing of it.’

‘And then you stayed.’

‘Didn’t mean to, but it was the gulf, how it was never the same. I wanted to see what it would do next. In the morning it might be flat, but by mid-afternoon, the waves could be riding high and coming in a slant, other times face on. Just one more day, I told myself. Then I’d head on down to south Texas. But I got to studying the night sky. I took to watching the moon and the tide. I wanted to see how high it’d come and how far back it’d fall.’

My fingers skimmed his collarbone, then the hollow at the base of his throat. The gulf must have been a wondrous thing to a man who once drove a slow-moving wagon heavy with coal through narrow alleys lined with carriage houses. The scrape of his shovel, the tumbling of coal down chutes, and the air thick with black dust must have felt far away when he first saw the wide, flat beach, the curling waves, and the curve of the horizon.

‘Watching the tides put a hole in my pocket,’ Oscar said. ‘So I found a job here at the dairy. The wages were low, but the work came with a bed and meals, and I got so I liked it. When Old Man Tarver died, he left the dairy to his daughter over in Houston. She didn’t want the life, said ten cows were ten too many for her. She set a fair price and I bought it from her.’ He paused. ‘Cleared my debt three years ago.’

A point of pride, I thought. ‘You’re a self-made man.’

‘That’s the shined-up version of stubborn.’

I laughed.

He said, ‘But you, a college woman.’ He played with my hair, running strands of it between his fingers. ‘What was it like, college?’

‘There’s little to tell,’ I said, forcing my voice to be light. I felt Oscar’s question leading to others about Philadelphia, about the ensemble, and about my return to Dayton. ‘If I wasn’t at the piano, I was in the classroom or studying in the library,’ I said. I kissed him then, distracting him, bringing us back to the present where there was only the two of us, a place I wanted to stay.

Such a thing was not possible. There were the constant demands of the dairy, Oscar’s concern for the cow with the swollen leg, and the rustic conditions at the small plain house on stilts. There was Andre, a little boy who needed his shirt tucked into his short pants, his grammar corrected, and piano lessons. And there was Nan Ogden.

Wednesday was cleaning day. Nan’s face was pinched as she worked with a fierce determination, scouring the tub and the basin in the washroom, scrubbing the floors and washing the kitchen walls. Outside it rained off and on, but instead of cooling the house as it had yesterday, the air was so thick and oppressive that I was forced to loosen the stays in my corset and to open the top buttons on my high collar.

The few times Nan did speak, her words snapped. ‘Them building blocks of yours are scattered every which way in the hall,’ she said to Andre after his nap. ‘You put them back where they belong. Right now.’ She glared at her brothers, Frank T. and Wiley, when they returned from their milk deliveries and came to the veranda where I sat with a book, Wiley carrying the block ice for the icebox, and Frank T. holding the newspapers.

‘For pity’s sake,’ Nan said. ‘Never known it to take two grown men to carry in a bitty block of ice. And don’t you track mud all over my floors.’

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Frank T. said. ‘You’ve been scratchy all week. Somebody’s got to carry in Oscar’s newspapers, don’t they? Wiley can’t do it all.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Someone certainly must.’ I smiled at Frank T. and took the papers from him. Frank T. grinned and that caused Nan to mutter something that I couldn’t hear. I thanked her for her hard work, and finally they left, evening just a few hours away.

That night, Oscar sprinkled water on the bed linens to keep us cool. The sky had cleared and the room was silver in the moonlight. ‘Moon’s working its way to full,’ Oscar said later. On our sides, we faced one another, his hand resting on my hip. ‘Let’s you and me go have a look.’

‘Now?’ I said. ‘But we’re not dressed.’

‘No one’ll see.’

‘But—’

He got up, put on his trousers, and pulled his braces over his bare shoulders. He found my hands and lifted me to my feet. Wearing only my nightdress and leaving my slippers behind, I went with him past Andre’s room and on through the parlor to the front veranda. Beyond the sand hills, whitecaps glimmered in the moon’s light as they crested. We left the veranda, the breeze ruffling my nightdress against my bare skin. The dirt was wet from the rain, and I walked slowly, the soil much rougher than the beach had been.

‘We won’t go far,’ Oscar said. ‘Just enough to clear the house. That way we can see the stars better.’

Wagging tails thumped against my legs, startling me. The dogs had come out from under the veranda. Oscar backed them off, and then he pointed up at the night sky with its thin wispy clouds. ‘She’s a beaut,’ he said about the moon. ‘And over there, that’s the North Star.’ He crouched down a little and had me put my cheek beside his raised arm so I could follow his finger. ‘It’s the one that’s fixed; it guides the sailors. It’s part of the Little Dipper. Now, over here, follow my aim. That’s the Great Bear. Those three stars, they make the tail. They form the handle of the Big Dipper, too. Once those clouds pass, we’ll see the body of the bear.’ We waited, the clouds drifting, the moon’s light dimming, then brightening. Beneath the sky’s vastness, I felt free, all restraints gone. ‘There,’ Oscar said. ‘Right there. That’s the Great Bear, plain as day.’

‘You see things that I do not,’ I said. ‘It’s all a maze to me.’ I reached for him, running my fingers up his arms and breathing in his scent of hay and soap.

‘Cathy,’ he said.

I embraced him. I wanted this moment never to end.

The night seemed to last only minutes with Oscar up hours before sunrise. If he was exhausted, it didn’t show. His smile came as easily as did his caresses, our hands touching when mid-morning he came back to the house. ‘Just to see how you’re getting on,’ he told me. He stayed only a few minutes but it was long enough to put Nan out of sorts. She was short with Andre when, a little later, he brought her a rock he’d found in the pasture. ‘I’m busy,’ I heard her say. ‘Dinner won’t make itself and I can hardly do it with you on my heels every time I turn around.’ He slunk off to the veranda where I was, his head down and his shoulders slumped.

‘I’d like to see it,’ I said. ‘If I may?’

He opened his hand. It was an ordinary gray rock and even Andre now seemed to see it as such, drooping all the more.

‘Tell me again the names of your dogs,’ I thought to say. ‘I didn’t have a pet when I was a child.’

He wrinkled his freckled nose, his dark eyes puzzled. ‘Why not?’ he said.

‘My mother wouldn’t allow it.’

‘Why not?’

‘She believed dogs and cats were dirty.’

‘How come?’

‘She had strict rules about hygiene.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Cleanliness,’ I said. I stood. ‘Now, no more questions. Let’s go see your dogs.’

He grinned. I’d surprised him, I thought as we stood in the yard with Bob, Streak, Bear, and Tracker. They smelled and were in need of baths, but all the same I felt a measure of pride. This was what a mother did, I told myself. She distracted her child when he was upset. I was learning.

That afternoon, I took Oscar’s book,
The Milky Way,
and went outside to the front veranda where Andre played on the floor with his set of dominos. The long-haired brown dog that Andre called Bob lay on the second step down with his back legs kicked out and his chin between his mud-flecked paws. Inside, Nan prepared the evening meal, the clanking of crockery and skillets telling me that she was hard at work.

I opened Oscar’s book and looked at the illustrations of star clusters as if this would tell me something about the man who showed me the North Star and the Great Bear. I skimmed over the text but stopped when I came across a passage underlined with pencil.

I had expected it to refer to the names of stars and planets. I read it again:
the hour of solitude.
The phrase turned in my mind.

The past eight months in Dayton had been my hour of solitude. My income almost gone, I had examined all of my choices. A possibility had been marriage to one of the elderly widowers who lived in the hotel. Another was employment in a shop and certain poverty. I had even considered using Edward’s letters against him. Instead, I chose Oscar.

I read the passage again.
We become ourselves; we are separated from the factitious life of the world.
Five nights ago at the pavilion, Oscar ate with the neighbor men and danced with the women, rural unrefined people, but that hadn’t mattered to him. He enjoyed their company. The music was simple and sentimental but for Oscar, it could have been a symphony. He found pleasure in the stars and admired the grace of pelicans. He was without pretense and this, I realized, was what drew me to him.

I found another underlined passage.

The truth. Not fiction. I went back to the first underlined passage:
closest communion with nature and with truth.

I put the book on the small table beside me and got up.

‘Ma’am?’ Andre said. ‘Where you going?’

‘Nowhere. Just thinking.’

I stepped around Andre and his dominos and went to the western edge of the veranda. All was still at the barnyard, and farther down the island, the rooftops of St. Mary’s were visible in a haze of salt.

The truth. It was important to Oscar.

The truth. My past. Something that must stay buried. If Oscar should find out, he’d never forgive me. But he wouldn’t find out. Unless someone from Dayton would write to him.

Don’t think about it, I told myself. I was finished with the past.

The black crystal earrings, I thought. The ones from Edward Davis. Last Friday, I had tucked them into a side pocket of one of the trunks. I had resolved to bury them in the sand or to throw them into the gulf. Before I’d had a chance to do so, Oscar had taken the trunks to the attic.

Perspiration broke out along my hairline. I couldn’t bear the thought of the earrings being anywhere in the house. I stepped back around Andre and went inside. At the cooking table, Nan chopped an onion with her back to me. She disliked me, I thought. She considered me unworthy of Oscar and of Andre. I could not cook, and I did not keep house. She watched my every move and passed judgment. I saw her disdain in the way she looked at me, and I heard it in her tone. I could not begin to imagine what she would do or say if she knew the truth about me.

Nan’s movements were jerky, stopping and starting in fits as she handled the knife. The door that opened to the attic stairwell was at the back parlor wall. I walked toward it. A floorboard popped and Nan turned around. Her eyes were red and tears ran down her cheeks.

‘Why, you’re crying,’ I said.

‘Am not,’ Nan said. ‘Don’t know why you’d say that.’ She put the knife down on the cutting board. ‘It’s the onion. I’d like to know the woman that can chop an onion and not bawl.’ She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. ‘I ain’t no crybaby, can’t nobody say that about me.’

‘Of course not.’ I couldn’t go up to the attic, I thought. Not with Nan watching.

‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘Might as well tell you now. Might as well just come out with it. Since you’re asking. Sunday’s my last day.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I’m needing a change, let’s just you and me let it go at that.’

‘I don’t understand.’

She didn’t say anything.

I said, ‘You’re leaving us? Quitting?’

‘I don’t quit nothing, never have. I’m making a change, that’s what this is.’ She turned around to the counter, her knife a sharp staccato on the cutting board again. Her back to me, she said, ‘But I won’t have it said that I didn’t give fair notice. I was fixing to tell you, this being just Thursday. There’s others out there. Maybe one of the older girls at St. Mary’s. Or somebody in town that’s looking for a change. Someone tired of working in a big, overly fancy house.’ Nan’s knife stopped; she turned to face me. ‘Mr Williams’ll have to ask around. There’s other women that cook good. I won’t have it said that I left you all in a fix.’