Three Women at the Water's Edge (9 page)

They lay in each other’s arms talking. Dale got up to get them a glass of water, and they sipped it, studying each other’s faces and bodies, and then they curled against each other and slept. They awoke in the night and made love. They slept again. In the morning they made love again, smugly, taking their fond and easeful time at it; then Dale made breakfast, walking around naked, feeling comfortable and satisfied in her body. Finally Hank said he had to go to his farm to feed his animals, and he asked Dale to come with him. He told her he wanted to show her his farm, that he wanted her to spend the day with him there. And Dale understood then that some sort of contract had been made between them, for this man she had fallen in love with did not do anything lightly. She was nearly ill with the richness of what she had found.

They dressed sensibly and rode out to his farm in the truck; this time she sat close to him as he drove, with her hand on his thigh. He warned her that she would be disappointed in his farm, and at first she was. The house was not much of a house. It was perhaps eighty years old, and had gone uncared for for too long a time. The front porch had warped and broken boards. The outside of the house needed painting badly, and the gutters needed repairing, as did the roof. Behind the house, however, stood two large barns and several smaller outbuildings, and these had clearly been recently repaired and painted red, and they had new green roofs. Inside the house it was, to Dale’s relief, clean, bright, and solid. There were two floors, but Hank lived entirely on the first floor in four large rooms: kitchen, bedroom, study, living room. The living room was actually an extension of the study; the walls were lined with books, and next to the old easy chair that was clearly Hank’s chair was a pile of journals, magazines, books, and newspapers. Hank walked through the house with Dale, pointing out how he had done this and that to bring the house back into shape: he had repaired all the rotted wooden windowsills; stripped the floors of their layers of grimy paint and sanded the original pine and filled the cracks and covered it all with a shield of polyurethane; put up storm windows; put a wood burning stove in the kitchen and one in the study; given all the walls a coat of eggshell white. The bedroom, he added, would be the dining room if and when he ever finished work on the upstairs, if and when he would ever need a dining room. As it was he took all his meals in the kitchen. The kitchen was large and bright and clean; Hank had put in new linoleum, but left the large old slate sink. He had a refrigerator and a gas stove, but admitted that from time to time he cooked on the wood stove and had even tried baking bread. Dale walked around the house, loving it, hungry to explore every crack and plane of it, because it was owned by Hank. The furniture was old but good, castoffs from Hank’s family. The house was comfortable enough, but lacked the grace that wallpaper or curtains or plants would have added. It was a comfortable, unpretentious place, with high ceilings and large long windows and beautiful wooden floors. Dale slowly ran her hand along the arm of the chair Hank usually sat in. She wanted to be that chair, to embrace him, provide him comfort and support, feel his bones and flesh sinking into her.

He did the chores while he showed her the barns. He had had the farm only a year, and clearly his work had all gone into the barns. They were clean and well maintained. In one smaller outbuilding Hank had chickens: seventeen of them, five of them banties. In a bigger barn he had his green John Deere tractor and his tools; his workroom was clearly one of his delights: hammers, nails, wrenches, saws, bolts, ropes, chains, barrels, cans, lanterns, wire, wire cutters—ev
erything was in a correct place. In the third barn were the cows and Hank’s horse. He seemed very pleased that Dale knew the cows were Herefords, beef cattle; and that the horse was a quarterhorse gelding. The large red-and-white cows were all milling around together in one large stall of the barn. There were eight of them, and they mooed at Hank and purposely bumped into him with their large rumps as they filed out the open door into the corral and then on out into the pasture. He slapped them lovingly in return. Dale could see how he felt about them; could see why he would not want to expose himself and his animals to an unsympathetic eye. He led the horse out into the field and stood scratching him, talking to him, giving him bits of corn, but finally the horse grew tired of the affection and tossed his head and trotted away. It was a cold brisk morning, but a sunny one. Dale and Hank walked around the pasture, and the edges of their boots grew dark from the heavy dew.

Hank owned only forty acres, but he had first option on an adjoining one hundred and fifty acres, which to his relief the owner was not yet ready to sell. He had made no profits from the farm yet; it absorbed every bit of his salary from teaching, and all of the money that his grandfather had willed him was in the equity. He discovered that it even cost more to feed the hens than it would have to buy eggs at a grocery store; but he liked the chickens, he liked the fresh eggs. He told Dale he would scramble her some for lunch. The pasture was wide and long and at one end was a large stand of trees. Not enough trees to be called a woods, but large enough and old enough so that Hank could get most of his firewood from it. That was another thing, he confessed, that pleased him greatly: felling an old tree, cutting it into the right lengths, stacking it in the trailer and pulling it in behind the tractor, then stacking it outside the house on the back porch, within easy reach of the kitchen. The wood stand was pleasantly varied: he got hard maple, birch, elm, oak, from it. And a man he knew down the road let him take all the applewood he wanted out of the orchard, provided the tree was dead or dying. The old farmer didn’t have a fireplace or a stove and didn’t need the wood, and he liked the orchard cleaned up. And Hank liked the smell of applewood in the winter; it sweetened the house.

The fences around Hank’s property were barbed wire and in perfect condition. Not a strand sagged or was loose from the posts. They walked back through the barns, which were fragrant with the bales of new hay that Hank had been piling in for the winter. Dale sat on a bale and watched Hank clean the cows’ stall, pitching the manure into a large stall in an opposite corner and putting fresh straw down. She felt enormous pleasure at the way his hands were sturdy and competent on the pitchfork, in the way his arm and back muscles flexed as he worked. She wanted to take a bite out of him.

For about an hour Hank worked. Dale sat with her elbows dug into her knees and her chin dug into her hands, watching. She felt quiet and content there in the barn with Hank, surrounded by the strong barn walls whose beams crossed and joined each other in intricate notched patterns, providing beauty, providing strength.

“You like it here, don’t you?” Hank said, when he had finished.

“Of course,” Dale said, “why do you seem so surprised?”

Hank shrugged. “Well, sometimes women don’t like manure, or they worry about mice and things.”

“Oh, no,” Dale said, “that didn’t even occur to me. I really do like it here.” Then she had to hide her face, for she felt so proud of herself, so smug, to have pleased him with her ease.

Later he scrambled eggs for her in his kitchen, and lit the wood stove. It gave off an agreeable radiant warmth. He served her hot coffee and eggs and toast with honey from a beekeeper down the road, and they talked.

“My parents think I’m crazy,” Hank said, and did not laugh. “They think this place is a waste of money, and that my entire life is now a waste of time. They wanted me to be a lawyer instead of a history teacher. And they wanted me to follow in my father’s and brother’s footsteps. A nice town house, a nice marriage, silver wedding presents, a respectable and useful life which everyone would know was respectable and useful because it would be reported in the proper sections of the proper papers. They were truly horrified when I told them that I was going to move here, take the academy job, and try to run a farm. God. Poor mother. First the divorce, and then this. I don’t think—”

“Divorce?” Dale said. She could not breathe.

“Yes,” Hank said. He had his back to her as he put more wood into the stove, but turned to look at her directly when he spoke. “I’m divorced.”

“You mean you were married?” Dale asked. What did this mean to her, why did it hurt her so?

He slammed the black cast-iron lid down onto the stove, and laughed. “Yes,” he said gently. “In order to get divorced, you have to be married.”

“Oh,” Dale said, and went dumb. She had a thousand questions to ask, and yet was not sure of her right to ask even one.

“I was married only about two years,” Hank said. He came back and sat down at the kitchen table with her. He talked into his coffee cup, suddenly weary, suddenly speaking as if by rote. “My ex-wife’s name was—is—Elaine, and she was—is—very pretty, very sweet, very nice. She came from the right family. My parents approved of her; she was the kind of girl they thought I should marry. She was tall and slim, and she went to Wellesley, and she liked cities and galleries and people and fashions. We had a large formal wedding; the whole marriage was really just a justification for the wedding. It was grand. The rest of the marriage was not so grand. And she was brought up to believe—as I was—that happiness is a rather vulgar goal, and moderation is admirable, and the way to live one’s life is to do what everyone else does, with a balance of flair to keep you interesting, and of restraint to keep you decorous. I don’t want to speak ill of her. I don’t hate her; I didn’t love her. I caused her a great deal of—pain is too strong a word. A great deal of bother. I caused her a great deal of bother by marrying her only as a form of experiment, as a test to see if I could go ahead and live the life my parents wanted me to live. It didn’t take me long to realize the whole package was disagreeable to me: law school; winter vacations at Elaine’s parents’ home in Sea Island; engraved stationery; propriety; moderate, continual success in work. Oh, God. Poor thing that she married me and never sensed the doubt, the traitor in me. Well, she’s married again, to a New York City banker, and she’s happy, and I’m glad. And I’m here, doing what I chose to do, and I’m happy, and I won’t impose my lifestyle on anyone else ever. I like teaching, I like this farm. I like a simple, private life. I don’t mind being alone.” He stopped then and looked up at Dale. “I’m sorry. I’ve talked too much.”

“You haven’t,” she protested. “You haven’t at all! I’m just stunned.” She felt awkward, and wanted to let him know it was all okay—the marriage, the divorce, the farm, everything about him. “My parents just recently divorced,” she told him. “They were married thirty years. I still can’t believe they’re divorced. I’ve got to go visit them. I’m afraid my mother’s gone senile or crazy or something. She’s apparently had a complete character change.”

“Thirty years,” Hank said. “God, that’s a long time to be married. Although my parents have been married at least that long—they must be going on
forty
years. It boggles the mind, doesn’t it?” He smiled.

“Tell me more about your parents,” Dale said.

“I will,” Hank replied. “But later. Now the sun has come out and I want to go out for a walk with you. I’ll tell you all about my parents later. Don’t get excited, though; it’s not a very fascinating tale. Come on.”

He pulled her to her feet and led her out the back kitchen door. “This way,” he said, and outside he seemed different: freer, younger. “There’s a path through the woods over there, that leads to some enormous old gray rocks, with a cave in one of them. It’s not my property, but I know the owner—I have the option on his land—and he doesn’t care if I walk there. I want to show it to you; it’s great. Are you warm enough?”

Dale laughed. Was she warm enough? She was on fire inside her sweater and leather jacket; she was incandescent with delight. He was going to show her rocks and caves; he was going to tell her about his parents. He had slept with her, he had fed her, he had talked to her, he was holding her hand. The late October day was crisp and cold and golden. Leaves crunched beneath their feet, birds called. As they climbed the side of a hill they could look down on the cattle standing in the far end of the pasture, dumb with the pleasure of warm sun on their backs. Dale felt expansive with a warming contentment; she thought she felt the pleasure of the cows, the satisfaction of the singing birds, the solid complacency of the earth beneath her feet. When she looked at Hank, she could not keep from smiling, and he smiled in the same way at her. Everyone in the world was surely allotted one day of joy, she thought, and that day had finally arrived for her. She relished it, she did not care what it cost, it was so sweet, so fine, it was worth anything. Occasionally Hank stopped walking, and took Dale in his arms and kissed her face, her breasts, her neck, and then stood awhile, simply holding her close to him, as if perhaps he too felt the miraculousness of the day, of what had been given to them. They walked through the woods, holding hands, or stood against a tree, embracing each other, wondering over and over again at what they felt: a total, complete, completing joy, as enormous and consuming and splendid as an ocean full of flames.