After dinner the door opened and a man lurched into the cabin living room, his boots thumping irregularly on the bare floor. “Thought I’d bring back this busted clock. Darn if I know how to fix it.”
Forrest introduced Mrs. Treadway and Jean to Earl Duran, the Indian who lived across the highway. “Ydeño, I call him,” he added.
“Pleased t’ meet you,” Earl said.
He sounded like Gene Autry to Jean. He grinned widely at Jean’s mother who told her later what he looked like—a large mouth of uneven yellow teeth, and a Grand Canyon of colored layers on his deeply lined face. The sunburnt chin and overhanging promontory of a nose were a dark reddish brown, the cheeks various shades of tan, moving up to a pasty yellow forehead above the permanent ridge his hatband made. Forrest asked him to stay awhile.
“No, I gotta ride into town to pick up a Sunday
Times
.”
“But it’s Saturday,” said Mrs. Treadway.
“Yup.”
“Isn’t it unusual to get a Sunday paper a day ahead? In New England the Sunday paper comes out on Sunday morning.”
“Well, ma’m, we have a reason for that. Folks out west buy the Sunday paper Saturdays so’s when they take it home to read they see the date is Sunday. Then they think they’ve already had their Saturday bath and don’t need to take it again.”
Jean was relieved to hear her mother laugh. “I suppose that’s as good a reason as any,” Mrs. Treadway said. That’s Mother. Always cordial. For most of the evening Earl kept them entertained with stories of turkey parades, thunderstorms and Santa Anas.
“Them’s the hot, dry winds that blow in from the desert three or four days at a time summer and fall. Dries up the water right off your eyeballs and spreads dust over everything so’s all the plants turn that army color. Your throat even tastes brown. Why, them winds can suck milk right out of a cow’s tit.” Jean gasped, worried about Mother’s reaction, but true to her upbringing, Mother kept her response completely internal. Maybe she was loosening up. “Yup,” Earl continued. “No other place like it, I reckon.” Finally, he left on his gimpy legs. She heard him speak kindly to the peacocks on his way out and wondered if Mother noticed it, too.
Jean could hardly sit still. At last, Forrest said, “Come on, Jean. I’ve got something to show you out in Hermit House.”
They left Mrs. Treadway with Mother Holly and Alice. Jean had waited nearly a year and a half, and now they’d been together for three hours and hadn’t even touched yet. The pressure was great. “Hop up,” Forrest said to Chiang. Even when Chiang went faster, Forrest tripped over her getting out to the little cabin. Jean noticed he forgot to scrape his feet at the threshold. That made her smile. He closed the door with his foot and they frantically found each other. Chiang was forgotten, her harness dropped.
“Wait, wait, Jean.” Forrest pulled away.
“What’s the matter?”
“Gotta turn out the light.”
She laughed at his romanticism. Gently, Forrest pulled her down to the edge of the bed, and she felt a tightening deep within she’d never felt before. He smelled of shoe polish and soap. Chiang whined. His hand caressed her bobbed hair. He fingered her earlobe, stroked her chin and neck. Their kiss was long and solid and full of yearning.
She discovered his sunglasses and took them off. She kissed him on the warm bridge of his nose right between the eyes. His big hand moved to the back of her head, drawing her toward him. He kissed her right at the hairline and her scalp tingled. He leaned back slowly, her body fitting the contours of his. When he pressed her to him, she let out a long, smooth sigh and didn’t dare move.
“We abandoned Mother,” she murmured eventually.
“Then I’ve got to ask you now.” He still held her. “Will you marry me?”
She drew away slightly.
“Well, there’ll always be everybody around. I don’t know when’ll be the next time we can be alone together. Will you marry me?”
Her back stiffened. She was not to be had that quickly. It wasn’t caution—she knew well enough she wanted him. That movement within when he took hold of her told her that. But he wasn’t going to smash her reserve that easily.
“I can’t say. It’s too soon. We’d better go back.”
The next night after dinner Forrest again remembered something he had to show her in Hermit House.
“Will you marry me?” he asked as soon as he closed the door behind them.
Jean moistened her lips. Would saying yes end this once-in-a-lifetime elation? Suddenly, strangely, she didn’t want to grab at the happiness offered as though the brass ring would never come around again. She felt giddy as she had years ago bobbing up and sinking down on gaudily painted carousel horses. Not answering just yet might keep the ride going longer.
When he asked again the third night, her hand went around his neck and she drew his head sideways so that it lay on her chest just under her chin. His hair smelled faintly of shampoo. “Yes,” she whispered, the sound escaping in a sigh, leaving behind unutterable peace.
He said nothing, only softly kissed her, without passion, as if it were a way to hallow the moment. They passed some time in stillness. It was different, she thought, than how she’d imagined it might be, more tender, reverent, less jubilant.
In the silence she felt him pulling away from her, as if the magnitude of the decision was sinking deep in his thoughts and forming concrete concerns. Unwillingly she yielded her moment of moments, the event that was to assure her of more than the narrow piece of life she had feared God had allotted her. He sat up with a start. It jarred the dreaminess of the moment. He could be excused, she thought a little wistfully. He was so in earnest.
“I don’t have a ring for you now, but I’ve been saving and I can send you one pretty soon. Then you can show all your girlfriends back east. But I do have something for you. Don’t move.”
Jean heard him open a dresser drawer. He came back to her and found her hand. In it he put something small and cold and hard. She fingered it carefully.
“What is it?”
“A gold track shoe.”
A short intake of breath, her fingers tight around the tiny shoe, and then she reached for him. He let her kiss him just once before his words began to tumble out.
“We could live right here in Hermit House. We’d call it something else, though. Anything you like. I know that it’s crazy to think of a guy in my situation marrying a sheltered, delicate flower like you, but I’m determined to be worthy of you, Jean. I’ve got a larger herd now than I did the last time you were here, and I’ll work hard and we can buy some more. I get $30 a month from selling milk to people around here. I don’t like to tell you this, but I also get $50 a month state aid. That’s how I bought my first cow and that was only three years ago. Someday I’m not going to need it though.” He paused. “Do you get any?” His voice was deeper.
“I get $75 a month from a family trust.”
This wasn’t part of how she imagined it—talking of money ten minutes after she’d said yes. In fact, she’d never talked of money. She never needed to.
Mother was gone for a week on the coast. Days melted together. In the mornings after milking they cut corn for the calves. They went together when he mucked the horses’ stalls, the barn smelling warm and fetid. In the late afternoons they sat in Hermit House to talk, trying to see their way into the future, but they told no one.
They visited the related families in the valley—Helen and Don just next door, Forrest’s married brother, Lance, and his wife Mary Kay at the turkey ranch on the hill. When Lance took Forrest aside to check on the turkeys, Jean thought she heard him say, “Get a country girl, Forrest.” She winced as if she had eaten a grape gone yellow and the bitterness was sudden. How could he say that when she loved it here? She told herself she didn’t care what his brother thought, it was Forrest that mattered, but that sourness lingered.
One day Alice drove Jean across the valley to the alfalfa field where Forrest was working. “You’re getting used to the ranch more and more now,” she said.
“I love it here. It’s so—” She searched for a word that didn’t sound prissy. “So free.” She meant more than that actually. It had something to do with what she imagined was western. Here at the Holly ranch, if you could call it a ranch, she felt under the influence of the free west—an unconfined place where people just were, not where formality and convention ruled every shred of a person’s behavior. She’d have to get used to not feeling pinched by propriety.
“You know it’s not going to be easy,” Alice said.
“Forrest told you?”
“No. He didn’t have to. We can see it in his face.”
“You mean—?”
“Mother, too.”
A sound escaped. That people could know such important things, not with words, but just by looking. Her mouth felt dry and her disadvantage, forgotten temporarily, returned with a sharper sting. Eventually Alice’s high-pitched voice brought her back to the present.
“He’ll make a fine husband, Jean. And a grateful one. Once he told me, ‘what right do I have even to think that such a tender little hot house plant could ever be happy out here in this rough place?’ Do you know what I told him?”
“No.”
“The right of earnestness.” Alice’s voice cracked even higher, and it occurred to Jean that whatever gain she felt, Alice felt a loss. “I’ve seen his determination for years—working to break a horse, working to vault a fraction of an inch higher, working to learn how to walk again. He doesn’t know this, but I’ve seen him whistling in the barn, and I think it’s to keep from crying. But he hasn’t done that since you came last year. Underneath his silly jokes he’s pretty serious.” Alice stopped abruptly.
Jean had an unsettling feeling she was taking something from Alice. No matter that Alice was married now and would eventually leave the ranch when her soldier husband came home. Brother and sister felt an uncommonly close bond, and somehow Alice’s comment cast her in the role of an interloper. “I’ll appreciate him,” Jean said quietly after a moment.
When Mrs. Treadway came back from her week of staying out of the way, Jean and Forrest knew it was time. She heard him stand up after dinner. “Mrs. Treadway, will you come to Hermit House with us? Jean and I would like to talk to you.” He sounded so formal.
In his cramped room, Forrest stood against the wall. Jean didn’t dare sit on the bed with Mother there. She settled on the rawhide rug so Mother could have the only chair. Forrest cleared his throat before he spoke. It made Jean conscious of a violent pulsing in her own throat. “Maybe you can guess, Mrs. Treadway, what I’m going to tell you.”
They waited. The wooden floor squeaked. Jean imagined him shifting his weight from one foot to the other, but this was one time not to follow Icy’s advice of letting her face show her amusement.
“The fact is, Mrs. Treadway, that I love your daughter.” Again he cleared his throat. “And I have reason to believe she loves me. So we’d like to get married. And we’d like to have your approval.”
Jean held her breath. She knew Mother would be gracious, but she still held her breath.
“Well, Forrest. That’s interesting. We’ll see what can work out.”
Interesting! What a dumb thing to say. She was surprised at the coolness in her mother’s voice, her mother who was always so careful of propriety. Jean lost patience. “We want to be married right away. What I mean is—Mother, I don’t want to go home. I want to stay here now.”
“That’s a little soon, Jean. We should telephone Father to see what he says.”
“Right now?”
“Yes. He should know what you’re thinking.”
Mother and Jean and Chiang and Forrest trooped back into the living room and Forrest showed Jean the telephone. She heard Alice and Mother Holly retreat to the kitchen.
Jean greeted Father nervously, knowing she was at a disadvantage. There was no luxury of waiting for Friday night cocktail hour to loosen him up. She blurted out, “Mother’s here and we’ve been having a good time and Forrest and I want to be married and I want to stay here, Father.” It was all she could muster. She began to shrivel up. When Father didn’t answer, in one impulsive movement she thrust the phone into Forrest’s stomach.
Immediately she knew that was unfair. He cleared his throat and spoke slowly. “Hello, Mr. Treadway. I know this must be a pretty big thing for you to chew on all at once, sir.” Silence. Silence from the eastern end of the line, too, she guessed. Her throat throbbed. She knew Father would be trying to appraise him just by the sound of his voice.
More silence. Apparently the conversation ended. She heard him place the receiver down quietly. “What did he say?”
“He just said, ‘Tell Jean to come home immediately.’”
The next day was a torture of ambiguity. Jean knew she had no choice. She wanted Father’s approval, that was certain. She needed his approval. They both did. There were practical considerations, if nothing else. They said a goodbye greater than all their goodbyes before. “No matter what Father says when I get home, I feel engaged,” she whispered close to his temple.
Mother announced they would take the Julian stage, a small rustic bus line that passed through Ramona carrying live poultry and mail to the train station in San Diego.
“Alice and I would be pleased to drive you, Mrs. Treadway,” Forrest offered.
“Thank you, no. Let’s think of it as an economy measure, for the war effort.”
But Jean knew it was to avoid drawing out their goodbye.
Just before they were to leave, Mother Holly put something in Jean’s hand. “This is a cactus blossom. It only blooms once a year and it bloomed last night. It’s a lovely pale pink. Take it with you.”
The bus bounced over the mountains, and chickens squawked under the seats. Jean held the cactus blossom to her lowered face and tried not to cry right out there in public. Her fingers traced the stiff petals, running carefully up one side to the point, lingering there and sliding down the other side back to the base. She twirled the stem slowly in her hand. She realized that Forrest’s mother was the last person to say goodbye. Forrest must have deferred to her at the final moment. It was a generous thing to do. There was more gentleness in this man with the rough hands and the western voice than she had guessed from his funny letters. She wondered what his face might have shown at that moment. If only she could have seen it for just a few seconds. It would have told her so much. She could keep it in her mind the months ahead. She wondered if Mother had noticed and she cried into the waxy pink blossom in her lap because she could not ask.