“Does your sister live in Ramona, too?” he asked.
“Nope. She’s peddlin’ her ass somewheres else, don’t know where for sure.”
Jean turned the water on fast. Maybe Mother didn’t hear. Why doesn’t Forrest change the subject? It was Father who did. “Are most of the homes in the valley served by well water?”
“Yup. That’s the only way. No public water service. We have to find it ourselves.”
“How do you know where to dig?”
“A witchin’ stick,” Earl said.
“No! That’s so primitive. I can’t believe that’s still used.”
“Works fine.”
Jean shifted her weight at the sink and smiled. The visit would be broadening to Father, if nothing else.
“I’ll show you how, tomorrow, if you’d like. Forrest and I are going to sight one at the Bradley place. Except you’d do better to wear some boots or other pants.”
“He’s got some,” Forrest said.
“Boots?”
“No, I bought some Levi’s today. First pair I’ve ever owned. Where’d we get them, Forrest?”
“Ransom Brothers Hardware. You don’t have them on now?”
“No. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to bend enough to sit down at the dinner table.”
“So Forrest showed you the town, eh?”
“More than that. He was a big spender today,” Father said. Jean could hear Forrest laugh with chagrin as Father warmed to his story. “He thought he’d take us out to lunch. Where was it?”
“Warner’s Hot Springs. But they were closed for the winter.” Forrest chuckled again.
“So we went to—.”
“Lake Henshaw.”
“But they were closed, too, so we ended up eating at some fish house on a rickety old dock. A little smelly, but great cuisine, though. We had our choice of codfish sandwich or fried egg sandwich.”
“I only spent $3.48 for all of us,” Forrest announced with bravado.
She could imagine Father telling this at the Ares and Aint’s. Well, it was probably good he felt he could tease Forrest. “Tomorrow night we’re going somewhere else. I had a roommate at Yale, George Richardson, who owns an inn near a golf course west of here. Rancho Santa Fe Inn, I think it’s called.”
“Yup, I’ve heard of it,” Earl said. “Pretty slick place, I’m told.”
“Well, he’ll give me a manhattan, even if Forrest won’t.”
“I don’t hardly know what one is,” Forrest said.
That night was the coldest one all winter. Why this week, of all weeks? It wasn’t that Jean had never been cold in Bristol, but never in the house. She walked into the tiny second bedroom, practically filled by the borrowed bed. The heat from the oil stove in the living room didn’t penetrate that far and she shivered. “You’d better wear your robe to bed,” she warned Mother.
In the morning Forrest got up early to heat up the oil stove before he left to do the milking. It crackled as the metal expanded in the heat and made the house smell like oil or diesel. Jean got up early, too. She knew Father and Mother were used to having their own bathroom. Father would die when he realized he’d have to sit in a bathtub instead of take a shower. They weren’t used to making their own bed, either. She would have to try to get in there to do that when he was in the bathroom. She could orchestrate the visit as smoothly as things allowed, but she couldn’t cushion Father from the reality of her life here. The week ahead seemed long.
As soon as Mother got up, she came out to stand by the oil stove.
“Do you want another robe, Mother?”
“No, dear, I’m fine. But I think we’ll spend the rest of the week at the inn.”
It surprised her, relieved her, too, and she spoke up. “I think that would be very nice.”
“We’re perfectly comfortable here, but I think your father would like to see George.”
Jean knew it wasn’t true. That was her mother—always tactful, even loving in her diplomacy, but tact wasn’t closeness, or even openness. Underlying her parents’ decision to stay at the inn was an unwillingness to be temporarily uncomfortable for the sake of sharing and of closeness. Staying here would have shown a different kind of love than her mother’s which was, perhaps, just sweetness.
It wasn’t resentment Jean felt. She just grew aware of an abyss which separated her from Mother, a difference in temperament. She could not, would not, be an echo of her mother out here in Ramona. The separation had been noiseless, the sundering merely a relaxation of ties. Probably Mother hadn’t even noticed.
Father came out and pulled the wicker chair up to the oil stove. “Kind of like camping out,” he said.
Forrest stomped dirt from his boots at the doorstep and came in. A gust of cold air killed whatever heat the oil burner had struggled to create. “You missed the first milking, but you can help on the next. I’ll show you my seeing eye bull. After breakfast, do you want to come with Earl and me? We’ve got to check on the cattle in the rented pasture before we go to Bradley’s.”
“No, Forrest, I think I’ll just supervise the view from the porch.”
When Earl came to pick up Forrest, Father cornered him when Forrest was washing up. “Do you think it’s safe for Forrest to follow that bull out there?”
“I’d worry about the bull if I was you, Mr. Treadway. Forrest can sling one mean rope.”
After Mother and Father left that afternoon, Jean discovered Father’s stiff new Levi’s, folded and laid carefully on the corner of the bed, with the price tag still on.
Chapter Twenty-three
It shouldn’t have happened, she thought. Icy deserved better. She was always the one to help me live. She always wanted a fuller life for me.
Jean blinked back tears and brushed away a fly that landed on her nose. Her hand dropped to the pile of damp balls of rolled up pillowcases, shirts and slips. She counted. Only eight more to go. The tired, old ironing board creaked as she worked. At each pass of the iron, a wave of dryness rose as vacant and sterile, she thought, as this dry, forgotten town. A crow cawed. Its scolding hung in the air.
It was a horrid way to find out—turning on the radio to listen to Amos ’n Andy and hearing instead the news announcement: “A military transport en route for Frankfurt carrying 321 wives and children of American servicemen visiting their husbands on leave went down over Newfoundland. There were no survivors.” The canned voice had echoed in her mind for days while part of her didn’t believe it until Mother’s telegram confirmed that Icy had been among the passengers.
Her throat felt stuffed with cotton wadding, dry and bursting for Icy’s death—so wrong, so undeserved—and for their girlhood gone. Up to now, the war had threatened, exploded and died and had hardly touched her. Lucy had joined the Red Cross Club Service and was sent to India at the base of the Burma Road, but she was safe, and was helping those servicemen pouring down from the mountains now that the war was over. Tready lost her husband in the South Pacific, but Alice’s husband came back safe, and Alice had left Ramona to join him at the Army base in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The war had affected others much more directly than it had her. She had lived in relative domestic peace, hampered only by lack of household goods—a washing machine and, for a time, a telephone—and the war had played out its distant drama of numbers, names and places, all without direct personal loss.
Until Icy. For years she had confided in Icy her fears that her life wouldn’t be full, and Icy had helped to fill it. Now it was Icy who had been cheated. What a dirty trick. She ached for Mrs. Eastman.
She put aside the iron and, with both hands, lifted the sheet and spread out a new section. She stretched her arms above and behind her shoulders and raised her hair to let in some coolness where a few wet strands were plastered to the nape of her neck. A cicada buzzed its tight, dry squeak. Icy. Icy. She reached for the iron without thinking. The hot triangle caught the knuckle of her little finger. Instinctively she put her hand to her mouth and sucked the burn. A tear crept down her cheek. She wiped it with the back of her hand, reached more gingerly for the iron and worked it back and forth across the sheet. A new tear made a wet, tickling path down her cheek and sizzled when it hit the iron. The sound startled her and made her smile a tight, quick smile. Icy’s lesson, even now: show on your face what you’re thinking. Another raced down the same trail and sizzled again. She imagined it bursting into tiny bouncing droplets like the ones she had seen as a little girl when Mary spit on the iron to see if it was hot. She worked more intensely, in order not to think, but one after another the drops fell and sizzled. Hearing them only unleashed more.
What would she do if Forrest came in? She’d already cried in front of him about Icy twice, and that was enough. He had little tolerance for tears. He’d want to know what was wrong now, and then she’d have to explain. It wasn’t just Icy, anyway. It was a dozen chronic aches that her mind played over during the brooding afternoons at the ironing board when Chiang, the cicadas and the whirring arms of some windmill were her only company. She couldn’t say she felt homesick, cramped up in this tiny cottage stuck out away from any real culture. That sounded snobby and would injure Forrest who was so contented here. Besides, she had chosen it. She couldn’t say he wasn’t good to her, even though he teased her too much. But telling him would be an admission that she was frail in character, a thing contemptible to him.
She heard him whistling outside. She sniffled quickly and wiped her face with the back of her hand. The door opened.
“Hey, Jeanie baby. Where are ya?”
She swallowed before she spoke. “Right here. Ironing.”
“Here’s the mail. Looks like another record from your folks.”
Good. He hadn’t detected, from her voice at least, but she was still afraid a leftover tear might fall to a sizzling exposure. She moved toward him, away from the iron.
“The fence in the south pasture’s busted. Cows could be anywhere. Earl’s here and we’re going over in the truck. We have to find ’em and fix it before we load.” She turned away from the door in case Earl was standing there looking in and would tell Forrest she’d been crying. “It’ll be after midnight before we’re done tonight.” His voice sounded agitated. He walked toward her and handed her the mail. “Just thought I ought to warn you.”
A new tear fell on her hand. Day and night were the same to him, she knew. She dipped her head so his kiss would land on her forehead or hair instead of her wet cheek. He turned, his boots struck the bare floor, the door closed, and the truck was off. Dust blew in the open window and she closed her eyes momentarily.
She always seemed to be waiting for him. Time alone inched forward. Self-reliant, that’s what marriage was making her, she thought. Self-contained, so that whatever happened she’d go on. Whatever Ramona would say about Forrest’s “high falutin’ eastern bride,” whatever Alice would do that cut her out of that cramped sisterly tightness she had with him, whatever Mother Holly would say about how she wasn’t washing her son’s precious wool socks right, whatever Forrest would say teasing her about Chiang and even about Jimmy—calling him an African because he’d lived in Morocco—whatever anyone would say, she’d stiffen up under it. Forrest had said that. Okay, maybe he was right, but it still hurt.
She blew out a puff of breath, lifting the hair on her forehead and thought back to the time she’d dreamt of marriage, marriage to anybody, before she met Forrest, when Tready tried teaching her how to iron and it was fun and new. She hadn’t known then that marriage could hurt. Even after she met him she didn’t think it would be like this. Maybe you don’t ever really know a man until you live with him, until you wake up tired and brush your teeth with him and wait for him while the dinner gets cold and wait for him to love you at night—maybe you just don’t ever know him before you marry him. And maybe that’s good, because otherwise no one would ever marry.
She pushed the iron. At least she had books to read. The Braille Institute sent new ones each month. And there was always her piano and now the children who rode their bicycles out from town for weekly lessons. And Heddy and Karl at the chicken ranch were good company. She and Chiang knew the way and walked by themselves now. Heddy and Karl took a midafternoon break for tea and cookies around 3:00 every day. Visiting them broke up the long afternoons. She liked it when Karl told her stories of his nomadic life as a lumberjack, of how he had emigrated to work on the railroads in Canada, and of how he tried to learn English from the gang boss. Jean smiled when she remembered him saying, “Yeesus Christ, Yeanie, after a year I discovered it was Russian.”
Once Heddy invited Jean and Forrest for a pork chop dinner. “Yeesus Christ, Forrest,” Karl bellowed, “let me cut that up so I can eat my own meal in peace.” When they came to visit Forrest and Jean, Karl said, “Yeesus Christ, Forrest, can’t you turn on some lights in here or haven’t you paid your bill?” She was surprised at his bluntness. In Bristol he would have been a factory worker and Heddy a serving woman, but in Ramona, things were different. Although she couldn’t talk to them about music or books, they slipped into each other’s lives naturally. Heddy was like Mary, the downstairs maid back home, genuine and earthy. She felt she’d known them for a long time.
Two months after Icy died, Jean and Chiang walked up the hill in time for afternoon cookies. “No tea for me today, Heddy. Do you have any milk?” Jean asked.
“Yeesus Christ,” Karl said. “You have something you want to tell us?”
Jean giggled. “Maybe.”
She felt him looking her up and down and it made her smile. He cleared his throat. “Does Forrest know?”
“Of course he does, Karl. And we’re going to name him Forrest, Junior, if he’s a boy.”
Heddy rushed over to her and smothered her in a hug.
“Yeesus Christ, Yeanie. Have some more cookies.” Karl put four more on her plate. “But how you going to manage? I know Forrest works hard, but, well, you can’t feed a kid on music lessons.”
In that, Karl touched the only apprehension Jean and Forrest had about the new baby. Right when he needed it most, his evening grain loading job dried up. After the war, Commodity Credit Corporation resumed shipping grain in gunny sacks instead of open bins. Forrest wrote more letters. He asked relatives for ideas. Nothing was too humble. He knew he had abilities and talents. He just needed opportunity, yet opportunity always seemed so dependent on others, just what he didn’t want to be. He hated the thought that he wasn’t being given a chance by a skeptical world.