“Now, Don, you know I’m going to have to get you back for showing me up as some no ’count in front of Jean here.”
The teasing surprised her. So different from Hickory Hill. It continued all through dinner. “All this talk makes me thirsty,” Forrest said.
“It’s further right, Forrest.” Alice’s voice was high and tinny.
“Alice, you been drinking my water? If you wanted to share, all you needed to do what to ask. After all, what are brothers for?”
“Oh, Jean, he always does this,” Alice said, “misunderstanding on purpose just to make a dumb joke.”
A few minutes after they started eating there was a hideous, whining scream. “Help, help,” it seemed to say. It came from the front of the house. Everybody kept eating and talking right through it.
“What’s that terrible scream?” Jean interrupted.
“Oh, it’s just the Indian, Earl Duran, across the highway. Going after his wife again,” Don said.
“Sounds like she’s just about to be murdered,” Forrest said.
Everybody laughed. The screeching continued.
“Tell me,” Jean insisted.
“It’s just the peacocks, dear. Don’t be alarmed.” Mother Holly’s voice was calming. “Some truck drivers know we have peacocks here, and when they go by on the highway they think it’s funny to honk their horn and that sets them off.”
“You shouldn’t believe everything they say,” Alice explained. “Earl doesn’t even have a wife.”
“But does an Indian really live across the road?”
“Oh, yes, three of them.”
Jean felt like she was at the edge of some frontier a world away from Connecticut, or back in time.
After dinner Forrest and Don put on a show of imitating people’s walks, apparently a favorite pastime, for they swung into action naturally, describing in exaggerated language what they were doing. The subjects were all local people, women they’d all known for years. One was a slink. Another an old maid teacher who took tiny mincing steps and kept her finger to her mouth. One girl made her bosoms bounce. “That’s Gloria. How could I forget her?” Forrest said. Another heaved her hips back and forth so widely she almost tipped over. Jean laughed with the others, her imagination running wild. It was free swinging western humor, not malicious but far from the contained tinkling laughter in the living room at Hickory Hill. But the strange thing was that it was visual. Forrest took part just as if he could see. And Dody had wanted her to write him because she thought
he
was having trouble?
Don and Helen left soon after dinner and Mother Holly and Alice went to bed early. Alone again. Staged. The setup made their being there seem so innocent, so wholly planned by a force apart from them that she felt comfortable accepting the direction events were moving.
She heard some scraping across the room and then a couple of thuds and the crackle of the fire. It dawned on her what was happening but her surprise made the words come anyway. “What in the world are you doing?”
“Putting another log on the fire.”
“How?” she blurted. Immediately, she felt foolish.
“Not very well. But I’ve got a poker here and some big tongs. I just have to poke around to find out what’s there.” He struggled for a while, and she heard a few thumps as he shifted the logs on the grate and they fell down. “I can tell by the crackling when I get it right. Sometimes.”
There were some things she would never tackle, things that probably shouldn’t be tackled. But she also knew the frustration of being told “you can’t” or “you shouldn’t.” Even worse than that was disbelief or distrust expressed by silence. One thing was sure. This man had spirit. Where was his despair, the crashing end Dody had said he thought his life had come to?
“Can you feel the heat?”
“Yes.” A wave of not only of heat but of feeling engulfed her. Something inside her—was that her heart?—brightened and felt a warmth from within, as an ember below a grate burns from within, making itself luminous, pulsing intermittently with radiance.
She didn’t want him to interpret her silence as disapproval. She had to say something. “What’s this room look like?”
“Oh, it’s a dandy.” A couple more thuds, then the crackling increased and she heard the scrape made by pulling the screen closed. “The fireplace is stone with a cougar skin hanging above it. When we were kids, we gathered the stones to make it. There are some crevices between the rocks and one night last winter Alice thought she saw a pair of eyes in a crevice about a foot above the hearth. I thought she was crazy, but everybody looked and, sure enough, a close-set pair of eyes was looking back. A snake, probably from under the house, had slithered through some crack in the cemented pile of rocks and found a tunnel which opened right into the living room. I don’t know which was more terrified, the snake or Alice. It was obvious the snake couldn’t retrace his path and crawl back out, but we didn’t want him coming out into the living room.”
“What did you do?”
“Only one thing we could do. Mix up some mortar and pack the varmint in. We felt kinda sorry for him because he didn’t mean any harm, but from the looks of his head, he might have been a rattler. I guess his skeleton is still lying there in his tunnel tomb.”
Jean gulped. Varmint. That was another one she’d have to tell Icy. But she couldn’t imagine telling Tready all this. “What else is in this room?”
“Oh, there’s a piano. You can play it if you like.”
“Who plays it here?”
“Alice. She rides all over the valley on Pronto to give music lessons in people’s homes. There are some Indian baskets and
ollas
, they’re water jugs, and an Indian rug in front of the fireplace. There’s a pair of elk horns on the wall behind you, so don’t get wild and decide to jump up. There’s a statue of Lincoln to the left of the fireplace and bookshelves all over. We probably have fifteen years of
National Geographics
.
A log suddenly thudded onto the grate and Forrest poked and pushed at it some more, unleashing a battery of crackles. Then he came over to sit with her. Her heart sped. He smelled like ashes and the outdoors. “We have two sofas in this room. One’s an old leather sofa. The newer one has a big buffalo robe draped over it.” He began to talk slower, as if he wanted her to understand more than what he was saying. “The leather sofa is the fighting sofa, for roughhousing when we were kids. The new one is called the sitting sofa. It’s for kissing.”
Jean’s hand went out to feel what she was sitting on. It felt furry. He put his arm around her shoulder. His voice dropped to a whisper. “This is the sitting sofa.”
Slowly, his hand traced a path over her shoulder to her neck. It wasn’t timid even though it moved with deliberate slowness. She held her breath, suspended in expectancy. His hand moved up her neck and held her head. His weight next to her on the sofa made the cushion dip down so that she was leaning toward him. He drew her head closer and his lips found hers.
She relaxed into his arms and, unguardedly, into his world for perhaps a moment. That was all. Then she drew herself back into her own, imperceptibly, though. She didn’t actually move away. Who was he to assume she wanted to kiss him just because they were thrust together and they were both blind? That’s too simple. His mouth was gentle, constant, moving over her face, her neck. But false aloofness was stupid, too. She felt part of her move toward him again, toward this man who built fires and rode horses and talked funny. And had sure hands.
Chapter Fourteen
A rooster crowed. From cloudy sleep, she woke but did not move, out of fear of spoiling those first dewy thoughts and the realization of where she was. Embers of the night before still glowed in her mind and made her smile into the blanket she drew up around her face. She often recounted to herself special moments. At honest times she recognized the pure indulgence of experiencing them again—her moments of passionate living were so few. And this morning she indulged herself. Maybe joy was always more penetrating after despair.
She bent her knees and pulled her nightgown down and tucked it under her feet. She thought how she and Forrest had talked late into the night. He had listened so earnestly. He’d never known another person who couldn’t see. She could tell he wanted to know about her life and her adjustment. He asked a thousand questions about Chiang, yet he hadn’t talked of his own blindness at all, never even used the word “blind,” as if it were a subject abhorrent to him. Their similarity drew them to each other as surely as he had drawn her face to his. No one had ever shown such intense interest in all the details of her life, not even Jimmy.
So Forrest was a pole vaulter. Funny. So was Jimmy. Forrest suffered bouts of asthma. So did Jimmy. Forrest said he wasn’t “too shabby” on the dance floor. Neither was Jimmy. But that’s where the similarities ceased.
Jimmy was an urbanite. Forrest, far from one. He wore cowboy boots. His c.b.’s, he called them, “complete with manure to prove they’re used.” Jimmy was pretty distant and independent from his family and rarely talked of them. Forrest was unusually close to his, and needed them. But the big difference was that Forrest was a westerner, had hauled hay, milked cows, shoed horses. He did things outdoors, and although he might do them differently now that he couldn’t see, he was still doing them. She knew how to value that. But what was she doing comparing? Leave Jimmy out of it! She threw off the blankets and got up.
She dressed and made her way out to the kitchen where voices sounded cheerful. “About time you got up,” Forrest teased.
“Is it late?”
“Not for a city girl, I suppose. Just that I’ve been waiting, doing a tap dance here in the kitchen.” His voice dropped. “I didn’t sleep much.”
Jean tried to think of a way to tease him back—there hadn’t been many hours left to sleep—but she stopped herself. She didn’t know who else was nearby.
“Now that you and I are going to be friends,” he said, “you oughta see what I do all day, and the first thing I do is milk the cows. In fact, I’m late now. You want to come along? I got something special to show you.”
“What’s that?”
“Just you wait. First, what do you have on your feet?”
“Shoes.”
“It rained some last night so that pasture’s mighty wet and it’ll come near to your waist, you’re such a little thing. We got to get you some boots. Come on out to the barn.”
Forrest led, then Chiang, then Jean. As Forrest walked, he clapped his hands sharply. Eventually it created a barely perceptible echo. “We’re here.” He turned left abruptly and Chiang followed. Clever, he was, to figure that out. Jean wondered if she would have ever thought of that as a way to guide herself. The barn door creaked as Forrest swung it open. Inside, the smell of damp hay and manure engulfed her. Its freshness made it not at all unpleasant. A cat meowed. Forrest fumbled around for a while and found some rope and a pair of black rubber waders.
“Where are you?”
“Over here.”
“Do you think these’ll fit?”
She reached out and found the heavy boots. “They’re huge.”
“Well, how abut putting them over your shoes?” He squatted down next to her and held one boot while she tugged at the other. She lost her balance and half fell, half leaned against him. Her arm went to his shoulder to catch herself. It was firm and muscular beneath his flannel shirt.
“Steady, girl,” he said.
“Sounds like you’re talking to a horse.”
“Maybe a filly. Will they work?”
“Yes, I guess so.” It must look foolish, she thought, because above the boots she wore a dress. Then she realized it didn’t matter.
Forrest headed toward the corral. Chiang and Jean followed.
“How do you know where you are?”
“The rise of the ground. Now, Jeanie, you may have Chiang and she’s a seeing eye dog. But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I’ve got a seeing eye bull.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Well, the cows are out in the pasture. Eight of them. They could be anywhere in the ten acres. How do you suppose I’m going to find them if they don’t come back for milking?”
“I don’t know.”
“I let my seeing eye bull spot them for me. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, ya know.”
Jean heard muffled snorting as they moved toward the corral. “I don’t want to go in there.”
“You don’t have to. Put your hand here on the fence so’s I know where you are. There’s a gate here just to your left, but don’t come in. I go in right here and clap a rope around Victor Mature here. That’s what I call the moose. Then he leads me out to the pasture to find the ladies.”
Jean held onto the corral rail with one hand, to Chiang’s harness with the other. She rubbed her hand along the weathered top rail. It felt satiny except where it was pocked by knots. The wood was sinewy, like Forrest’s arm was when she stroked it the night before. A breeze made her bare arms tingle. She leaned to the left side and a little forward, her stay-alert-to-perceive-everything stance. She could hardly believe what Forrest was doing. And he was so sure about it. The snorting came again, forceful and low. Forrest announced his presence to the bull just inside the gate. The bull grunted and shuffled a little in response.
“Yeah, big boy. Now I know where you are.” Jean heard them scuffle and heard a rope swish. She held her breath. “Hey, hey. Got him, slick as a whistle.” Jean heard them come toward her and a little to the left. She slid up closer to the rail in front of her. “He’s on his way, Jeanie. Will Chiang follow?”
“I hope so. She’s never followed a bull before.” Jean moved away from the fence and turned in the direction she heard Forrest. “Forward,” she said to Chiang, forcefully, she thought, and the four of them were off, rumbling out across the pasture. The long grass brushed wet against her knees above the big boots and the ground swelled beneath her feet like ocean billows. She felt just on the edge of danger. What was she thinking of, wandering out in the middle of a pasture with a bull and cows and who knows what else? Still, her awe at what this man could do, what he was in fact doing, every day of his life, was enough to take her out with him to that pasture and to whatever may happen there. She was drawn to him just as if another rope attached to him were pulling her along. Forrest whistled so she could know where he was and sometimes his footsteps splattered in a puddle. That helped her to follow. Air blew up her skirt and felt cool where the wet grass had left moisture. It sent a quick shiver up her back.