Or-when you considered the war and the ordinary Army-just to be a man.
The thought of his future might have come to him because we had noticed, on the trunk of a beech tree-those trees whose gray bark is ideal for messages-a carved face and a date. The year was 1909. During the time since, the tree had been growing, its trunk had been widening, so that the outlines of the face had broadened at the sides to become blotches wider than the face itself. The rest of the date had been blotched out entirely, and the numbers of the year might soon be illegible as well.
"That was before the First World War," I said. "Whoever did it might be dead now. He might"ve been killed in that war.
"Or he could just be dead anyway," I added hastily.
It was on that day, I believe, that we got so hot on the way back that we took off our shoes and socks and lowered ourselves from the planks to stand in the knee-high water of the creek. We splashed our arms and faces.
"You know that time I got caught coming out from under the apple tree?" I said, to my own surprise.
"Yeah."
"I told her I was looking for a bracelet, but it wasn"t true. I went in there for another reason."
"Is that right?"
By now I wished I had not started this.
"I wanted to get under the big tree when it was all in bloom and look up at it from underneath."
He laughed. "That"s funny," he said. "I wanted to do that too. I never did, but I thought about it."
I was surprised, and somehow not quite pleased, to find that we had had this urge in common. But surely I would not have told him if I hadn"t hoped that it was something he would understand?
"Come to our place for supper," he said.
"Don"t you have to ask your mother if it"s all right?"
"She don"t care."
My mother would have cared, if she had known. But she didn"t know, because I lied and said I was going to my friend Claras. Now that my father had to be at the Foundry by five o"clock-even on Sundays, because he was the watchman-and my mother was so often not feeling well, our suppers had become rather haphazard. If I cooked, there were things that I liked. One was sliced bread and cheese with milk and beaten eggs poured over it, baked in the oven. Another, also oven-baked, was a loaf of tinned meat coated with brown sugar. Or heaps of slices of raw potato that had been fried to a crisp. Left to themselves, my brother and sister would make a supper of something like sardines on soda crackers or peanut b.u.t.ter on graham wafers. Erosion of regular customs in our house seemed to make my deception easier.
Perhaps my mother, if she had known, would have found a way to say to me that once you went into certain houses as an equal and a friend-and this was true even if they were in a way perfectly respectable houses-you showed that the value you put on yourself was not very high, and after that others would value you accordingly. I would have argued with her, of course, and the more fiercely because I would have known that what she was saying was true, as far as life in that town went. I was the one, after all, who would make any excuse now not to go with my friends past the corner where Russell and his family stationed themselves on Sat.u.r.day nights.
I sometimes thought ahead hopefully to the time when Russell would have put away that slightly comic dark-blue red-piped uniform and replaced it with khaki. It seemed as if much more than the uniform might be changed, that an ident.i.ty itself could be peeled away and a fresh one shine out, una.s.sailable, once he was dressed as a fighting man.
The Craiks lived on a narrow diagonal street only a block long, not far from the horse barns. I had never had any reason to walk along this street before. The houses were close to the sidewalk and close to each other with no room for driveways or side yards in between. The people who owned cars had to park them partly on the sidewalk and partly on the strips of gra.s.s that served as front lawns. The Craiks" large wooden house was painted yellow-Russell had told me to look for the yellow house-but the paint was weathered and blistered.
Just as the brown paint was, that had once, ill-advisedly, covered the red brick of the house that I lived in. When it came to ready money our two families were not so far apart. Not far apart at all.
Two little girls were sitting on the front step, maybe stationed there in case I should have forgotten the house"s description.
They jumped up, however, without a word, and ran into the house as if I"d been a wildcat after them. The screen door banged in my face and I was left staring down a long bare hallway. I could hear a subdued commotion in the back of the house, perhaps having to do with who should go to greet me. And then Russell himself came down the stairs, his hair dark from a recent wetting, and let me in.
"So you got here okay," he said. He backed off from touching me.
Mr. and Mrs. Craik did not wear their Salvation Army uniforms around home. I don"t know why I had thought they would. The father, whose street preaching was always on the ferocious side, wrathful even when he held out the hope of mercy and salvation, and whose expression when he sat hunched on the coal wagon was always one of disgruntlement, came forward now as a scrubbed and tidy man with a shining bald head, and greeted me as if he was actually glad to see me in his house. The mother was tall, like Russell, large-boned and flat-fronted, with gray hair chopped off at the level of her ears. Russell had to tell her my name twice, through the racket she was making mashing the potatoes, before he could get her to turn around. She wiped her hand on her ap.r.o.n as if she had thought of shaking mine, but she did not do so. She said that she was pleased to meet me. Her voice when she sang the street-corner hymns was full and sweet, but when she spoke now it cracked with embarra.s.sment like an adolescent boy"s.
Russell"s father was ready to step into the breach. He asked me if I had any experience of banty hens. I said no, and he said he had thought I might have, being brought up on a farm.
"The hens are my hobby," he said. "Come and have a look."
The two girls had reappeared and were hanging around in the hall doorway. They were about to follow their father and Russell and me out into the backyard, but their mother called to them.
"Annieanmavis! You stay here an put the plates on the table."
The banty rooster was named King George.
"That"s a joke," Mr. Craik said. "On account of George is my name."
The hens were named after Mae West and Tugboat Annie and Daisy Mae and other personalities from the movies or comic strips or popular folklore. This surprised me because of the fact that movies were forbidden to this family and the movie theatre was singled out in the Sat.u.r.day sermons as a place to be specially abhorred. I had thought the comic strips would be out of bounds as well. Perhaps it was all right to give such names to silly hens. Or perhaps the Craiks had not always belonged to the Salvation Army.
"How do you tell which is which?" I said. I didn"t have my wits about me at all, or else I would have seen that each was distinctly marked, had its own pattern of red and brown and rust and gold feathers.
Russell"s brother had turned up from somewhere. He snickered.
"Oh, you learn to," the father said. He began to identify each one for me, but the hens were getting fl.u.s.tered by all the attention and scattered around the yard so that he couldn"t keep them straight. The rooster was bold and pecked at my shoe.
"Don"t be alarmed," Russell"s father said. "He"s just showing off."
"Do they lay eggs?" was my next foolish-sounding question.
"Oh, they do, they do, but not so"s it"s a common occurrence. No. Not even enough for our own table. Oh no, they"re an ornamental breed, that"s what they are. Ornamental breed."
"You"re going to get a clout," Russell said to his brother, behind my back.
At supper, the father gave Russell a nod to ask the Blessing, and Russell did so. Blessings here were leisurely and composed on the spot to suit the occasion, nothing like the Bless-this-food-to-our-use-and-us-to-thy-service that used to be mumbled at our table at home when we ate as a family. Russell spoke slowly and confidently and mentioned the name of everyone at the table-including me, asking that the Lord should make me welcome. The chill thought came to me that the war might not rescue him entirely, that when it was through with him he might revert to the other Army and put on the old uniform, that he might even have a gift and a hankering for public preaching.
There were no bread-and-b.u.t.ter plates. You put your slice of bread on the oilcloth or on the side of your big plate. And you wiped your plate clean with a piece of bread before the pie was set down on it.
The rooster appeared in the doorway but was ordered away by Mr. Craik. This caused Mavis and Annie to giggle and hold their mouths.
"Choke on your food and it"ll serve you right," said Russell.
Mrs. Craik avoided saying my name-she said in a harsh whisper to Russell, "Pa.s.s her the tomatoes"-but this seemed to be the result of extreme shyness, not of ill will. Mr. Craik continued to show an unperturbed sense of social occasion, asking me how my mother"s health was, and what hours my father worked at the Foundry and how he liked his job there, did he find it a change from being his own boss? His way of speaking to me was more that of a teacher or a shopkeeper or even a professional man in town, than that of the man on the coal wagon. And he seemed to take it for granted that our families were on an equal footing and had a comfortable acquaintance with each other. This was close to the truth, as far as the equal footing went, and it was also true that my father had a comfortable acquaintance with almost everybody. Nevertheless it made me feel uneasy, even a little ashamed, because I was deceiving this family and my own, I was at this table under false pretenses.
But it seemed to me then that Russell and I would have been under false pretenses at any family supper table where we had to sit as if we were concerned with nothing but the food and whatever conversation was offered. While in fact we were marking time, our urgent needs were not to be met here, and our only real concern was to get at each other"s skin.
It never crossed my mind that a young couple in our situation did indeed belong right here, that we were entered on the first stage of a life that would turn us, soon enough, into the Father and the Mother. Russell"s parents probably knew this, and may have been privately dismayed, but decently hopeful, or resigned. Russell was already a force in the family whom they did not control. And Russell knew it, if he was capable at the moment of thinking that far ahead. He hardly looked at me, but when he did it was a steady look, laying claim, and it hit me and resonated as if I"d been a drum.
It was late in the summer now, the evenings closed in early. The light was turned on in the kitchen when we did the dishes. The dishpan was set on the table, the water had been heated on the stove, which was just the way things were managed when I washed the dishes at home. The mother washed, the sisters and I dried. Perhaps relieved that the meal was over and that I would soon be going home, Russell"s mother made a few statements.
"It always takes more dishes than you"d think it would for to make a meal."
"Don"t bother with them pots, I"ll set them on the stove."
"That looks like it"s about it now."
This last sentence sounded like a thank-you that she didn"t know how to say.
So close to me and to their mother, Mavis and Annie had not dared giggle. When we got in each other"s way at the draining pan they had said softly, "Parmee."
Russell came in from helping his father put the banties to roost. He said, "I guess it"s time for you to be getting home," as if getting me home was just another nightly ch.o.r.e, instead of our antic.i.p.ated first walk in the dark together. Mutely, exquisitely antic.i.p.ated, on my part, the thought of it growing all through the dish-drying routine and even transforming that into a feminine ritual mysteriously linked to what was to come.
It was not so dark as I had hoped. To get me home we would have to cross the town, east to west, and almost certainly we would be noticed.
But that was not where we were going. At the end of this short street Russell put his hand on my back-a quick, functional pressure, to head me not towards home but towards Miriam McAlpin"s horse barn.
I turned around to see if anybody was spying on us.
"What if your brother or sisters followed us?"
"They wouldn"t," he said. "I"d kill them."
The barn was painted red, the color plain in the half-dark. The stable doors were on the lower level in the back. On the upper barn doors, which faced the street, were painted two prancing white horses. A gangway of stone and earth was built up to these doors-this was the way the loads of hay were driven in. In one of these big upper doors there was an ordinary-sized door, fitted snugly so that you would hardly notice it, holding the hoof and part of one painted horse"s back legs. It was locked, but Russell had the key.
He pulled me inside after him. And once he had closed the door behind us we were in what was at first pitch-black darkness. All around us, almost choking us, the smell of that summer"s new hay. Russell led me by the hand just as confidently as if he could see. His hand was hotter than mine.
After a moment I could see something myself. Bales of hay set one on top of another like giant bricks. We were in some sort of loft, overlooking the stable. Now I could get a strong smell of horses, as well as of hay, and hear continual shuffling and munching and gentle b.u.mping around in the stalls. Most horses would be out in the pasture all night at this time of year, but these were probably too valuable to be left outside in the dark.
Russell put my hand on the rung of a ladder, by which we could climb to the top of the hay bales.
"Want me to go first or after?" he whispered.
Why whisper? Would we disturb the horses? Or does it just always seem natural to whisper in the dark? Or when you have gone weak in the legs but aching, determined, in another part of your body.
Something happened then. I thought for a moment that it was an explosion. Lightning hitting. Or even an earthquake. It seemed to me that the whole barn shook as it filled with light. Of course I had never been anywhere near an explosion or within a mile of a place where lightning struck, never felt one tremor of an earthquake. I had heard guns going off but always out of doors and at some distance. I had never heard the blast of a shotgun indoors under a high roof.
That was what I had heard now. Miriam McAlpin had shot her gun off, shot it up into the mow, then at once turned on all the barn lights. The horses had gone wild, whinnying and tossing themselves about and kicking the sides of their stalls, but you could still hear Miriam yelling.
"I know you"re there. I know you"re there."
"Go home," Russell was hissing into my ear. He spun me around towards the door.
"Go on home," he said angrily, or at least with an urgency like anger. As if I"d been a dog following him, or one of his little sisters, who had no right to be here.
Perhaps he said that too in a whisper, perhaps not. With the noise that the horses and Miriam made together, it wouldn"t have mattered. He gave me one strong and untender push, then turned towards the stable and hollered, "Don"t shoot, it"s me . . . Hey Miriam. It"s me."
"I know you"re there-"
"It"s me. It"s Russ." He had run to the front of the haymow.
"Who"s up there? Russ? Is that you? Russ?"
There must have been a ladder going down to the stable. I heard Russell"s voice descending. He sounded bold but shaky, as if he was not quite sure that Miriam would not start shooting again.
"It"s just me. I come in the top way."
"I heard somebody," said Miriam disbelievingly.
"I know. It was me. I just come in to see Lou. How her leg was."
"It was you? "
"Yeah. I told you."
"You were up in the mow."
"I come in by the top door."
He sounded more in control now. He was able to ask a question of his own.
"How long you been in here?"
"I just came in now. I was in the house and suddenly it hit me, there"s something wrong at the barn."
"What"d you fire off the gun for? You could"ve killed me."
"If anybody was in here I wanted to give them a scare."
"You could"ve waited. You could"ve yelled first. You could"ve killed me."
"It never crossed my mind it was you."
Then Miriam McAlpin cried out again, as if she"d just spotted a new intruder.
"I could"ve killed you. Oh, Russ. I never thought. I could"ve shot you."
"Okay. Calm down," Russell said. "You could"ve but you didn"t."
"You could be shot now and I"d be the one that did it."
"You didn"t."
"What if I had, though? Jesus. Jesus. What if I had?"
She was weeping and saying something like this over and over, but in a m.u.f.fled voice, as if something was stuffed into her mouth.
Or as if she was being held, pressed against something, somebody, that could comfort and quiet her.
Russell"s voice, swelling with mastery, soothing.
"Okay. Yeah. So okay, honey. Okay."
That was the last thing I heard. What a strange word to speak to Miriam McAlpin. Honey. The word he"d used to me, during our bouts of kissing. Commonplace enough, but then it had seemed something I could suck up, a sweet mouthful like the stuff itself. Why would he say it now, when I wasn"t anywhere near him? And in just the same way. Just the same.
Into the hair, against the ear, of Miriam McAlpin.