Long, long before Mrs Lewis cooked for the Burbanks, a tree fell on Mr Lewis in the woods and killed him in his ‘prime.’ Mrs Lewis hoped to be one with him again in what she called their eternal home, but the suspended relationship left her with a mixed bag of acid sayings, bitter observations and chilly maxims.
‘Eaten fruit is soon forgot,’ she would suddenly remark, looking up from her work, from pummeling bread dough and slamming it down without mercy on the scarred face of the zinc-topped table. ‘If we could only see before us,’ she often remarked, ‘the deepest river wouldn’t be too deep.’
Rose had made a light, uncertain laugh. ‘Things can’t be that bad, Mrs Lewis.’
‘Do you really believe that, Mrs Burbank?’ Mrs Lewis asked.
‘It’s a small world,’ she once remarked, and moved heavily to the cook-stove. Her heavy black shoes were slit to relieve bunions got from years of treading floors of strangers. She dropped the letter into the coals and watched it curl and disappear. ‘A friend of Mr Lewis,’ she remarked. ‘He drank with Mr Lewis. It’s a small world.’
She frightened Lola with stories of ‘bad’ girls who ended up in trunks left forgotten in sheds and railway stations and with tales of people remembered, friends and enemies. She told of a woman with a tapeworm that moved up into the woman’s throat at mealtime, to remind her. Mrs Lewis, finishing a story, would blink slowly, like a tortoise.
The removal of a graveyard that blocked a projected federal highway required the digging up of coffins, among them that of a friend of Mrs Lewis; a clumsy tractor driver had split open the coffin with the tractor blade and it was found that the woman’s hair had continued to grow after death.
‘The whole coffin,’ Mrs Lewis marveled, ‘just stuffed with her lovely golden hair, except for a few feet from the end, where it was gray.’
When Lola came to work for the Burbanks she used money from her first paycheck for a subscription to True Romance, a magazine her father had forbidden her to read; once when he found her reading a copy borrowed from another girl, he had made her stand before him and rip it up, page by page. She was grateful he had not whipped her.
Two women alone so much in the front of the house, she and Rose became friends, a friendship that perhaps began when Lola asked if what they said about the movie stars was true. Like the men in the bunkhouse, she believed that if a thing was printed, it was true. She believed that people could be put in jail if what they printed wasn’t true.
‘What special thing was it you had in mind?’ Rose asked.
‘Well, there’s this big star,’ Lola said. ‘Darlene O’Hare.’
‘Yes, I think I’ve heard of her.’
‘Well, it says —’ And Lola flushed. ‘It says she takes baths in milk.’
‘Then I’m sure she does. I can’t see why they’d say it unless she did.’
‘My father would certainly never hold with anything like that,’ Lola said.
‘I believe your father is right,’ Rose said. ‘A person could get into no end of trouble, starting with that. One thing would lead to another.’
‘You bet your life it would,’ Lola said with sudden passion. ‘My father is very strict.’
She talked a good deal of her father. He went down to Beech to church, she said. Once the dog was lost in a wild snowstorm and her father went out to find the dog in the middle of a night. It was caught in a trap. One time, Lola said, there were some sick Swedes who had no money, and her father took some meat they had and gave it to the Swedes because he said that God would pervide.
‘And do you know what happened?’ Lola asked. ‘A deer came right down into the yard. It came right into the yard and stood there and looked right into my father’s eyes, asking to be shot.’
Each week she wrote her father, and Rose worried because her father never answered, and at last she asked, ‘Do you often hear from your father?’
‘Oh, no,’ Lola said. ‘My father never learned to write. He can’t read much, either. The kids have to read the letters to him. But my mother was a wonderful reader and a writer.’
‘She taught you, then?’
‘Oh, my yes. Before I went to school, even. And she’s been dead many a year, Mrs Burbank. And do you know what my father said?’
‘What did he say?’
Lola stood with a limp dustcloth in her hand, and as she spoke she stared out at the face of the sagebrush hills. ‘He said my mother needn’t’ve died.’
‘What did he mean by that?’
‘The doctor wouldn’t come to him. He knew we didn’t have money. Oh, we never had money. My father said if the old doctor was still there, my mother wouldn’t of died.’
The clock beside the door whirred and prepared to strike the hour before noon. ‘What was the other doctor’s name?’
‘His name? What was his name?’ The clock began to strike and all but drowned Lola’s voice. Rose looked out the window up the road. A few hours before she had stood on the porch watching the old Reo disappear over the rise; earlier, she had come on a curious scene. George hadn’t heard her come into the bedroom and she saw him at the bathroom mirror, looking at himself. He had finished shaving, and simply stood there, looking. Quietly she left the room. Then he came out dressed for town. He made no mention of her driving with him. She couldn’t understand it.
‘Was his name,’ Rose asked, ‘Dr Gordon — the old doctor?’
Lola looked at her astonished. ‘Yes. That was it. So you knew him, too.’ Lola marveled at the coincidence, the sort of coincidence that gave credence to the awful stories of Mrs Lewis. ‘Dr John Gordon.’
Rose parted her lips. It was almost as if she had heard her own name on the lips of a ghost. ‘John.’
‘It’s a small world,’ Lola remarked.
Yes, Rose thought. Much too small.
Now over the rise up the road came Phil on his pacing sorrel horse. This was the day, with George gone, that she must speak to Phil, and already she felt the terror that preceded her recent sickening headaches.
Did she have a headache at the moment? the doctor had wanted to know.
No, she said. At the moment she didn’t.
Would she describe the headaches.
She said they were directly behind her eyes, and that pressure seemed to force her eyes out of her head.
Ah, then. Did she do a great deal of reading?
Not recently. True, she had once read a great deal. She had read often to her husband, and to her son. ‘My first husband,’ she explained.
The doctor sent her across the hall to the optometrist. ‘My brother-in-law,’ the doctor pointed out.
The small, puzzled optometrist made her read the big letters and the small ones. He drew the shades and flashed lights into her eyes. Then he sent her back to the doctor, with a note.
‘Your eating habits, Mrs Burbank?’
She could think of nothing odd, except that she seldom ate breakfast, and then — well, she’d almost never eaten breakfast.
Ah, then! Hunger can cause headaches. Did she notice that often before the noon meal she had headaches?
… Yes, she did. Often she had them just before noon.
‘You just start with a good hearty breakfast, Mrs Burbank. Why, breakfast is the most important meal! And I can pretty well assure you …’
Breakfast for the men was at six, and George and Phil joined them in the back dining room for oatmeal, pancakes, ham and eggs and coffee, and while they sat smoking for ten minutes and picking their teeth, George would give the orders for the day. Then the men would file out to the bunkhouse, smoking, still picking their teeth, bringing gifts of cold pancakes to the dogs who jumped and whined.
In the days when the Old Gent and the Old Lady ate a breakfast in the front dining room at eight, they sat opposite each other across the white expanse, spoke to each other in well-bred syllables and ate omelettes, perhaps creamed chipped beef on points of toast, salt mackerel and boiled potatoes. They might eat strawberries or grapefruit, delicacies hardly known in that country, and shipped at great cost and the risk of freezing from Salt Lake City. Finished, they touched their mouths with napkins, touched the surface of the water in their finger bowls, wiped their fingers, folded the napkins, rolled them and poked them into silver rings. These little ceremonies took a bit of the curse off the hopeless view from the front windows, the sagebrush hill, off the bitter winter weather and the sometimes appalling knowledge that Boston was over three thousand miles away. Their doubts about the nature of their lives they never dared communicate to each other, each depending on the conviction of the other that what they had done with their years was reasonable if not rewarding. Each morning, breakfast done, the table cleared, the one or the other spoke as the sun crawled up from behind the hill.
‘Looks as if it’s going to be a good day.’
Or, ‘Looks as if it’s going to storm.’
Or, ‘Well, the storm must be over before long, don’t you think.’
Then the Old Gent, hands clasped behind his back, began to pace in stiff, straight, military fashion across the carpet.
Step, step, step. Smart turn. Step, step, step. Watching his feet, watching his feet make the step, make the turn.
The Old Lady escaped to her pink room, there to lie a bit on the chaise longue, if the room was warm; to regard the distant mountains, to fuss with a little needlework. She wrote voluminous letters back East. It had often puzzled people why these two had come West, these two who scarcely knew a Hereford from a Shorthorn, who neither rode nor hunted, who could only nurse their little ceremonies.
She decided against telling George the doctor’s orders about breakfast; he might suggest her eating at the table, as his mother had; but servants embarrassed her. She had often felt Phil’s eyes as Lola offered peas or beets, aware that her straight back and rigidity was embarrassment and not the poise Lola might take it for. So she went each morning to the kitchen for a bowl of oatmeal.
The doctor might be right.
She was poised, safe for the moment on a tightwire, and no net below.
Then the headaches struck again, swiftly, and the pain pushed tears to her eyes. About one thing the doctor was right. The pain seized her shortly before meals. Aspirin again, and the Bromo-Seltzer. She pressed her fingers hard against her temples, seeking to block the nerves.
Toward the end of Johnny Gordon’s life, when he had vowed never to drink again, she had found him pouring himself a drink. He was startled, and his eyes looked naked; when he spoke, he stammered. His stammering surprised her, for she had never judged him. ‘I have a bad tooth,’ he explained. ‘The pain is about to kill me.’
He told the truth. The tooth was pulled.
Now, driven to the same distraction, she went to the liquor cabinet in the buffet, first picking from off its hook the key hidden in the china cupboard. She stooped before the small door, amazed at her pounding heart. Lola’s step on the stairs. She rose from a crouching position, and stood until Lola passed into the kitchen. Then she stooped again, and hurried with whiskey to the bathroom, shielding it in the crook of her arm. She locked herself in the bathroom, poured it down. The effort left her gasping. She held the ends of her fingers so tight against her temples that white flames flickered in the dark of her brain.
And it worked. Quite calmly she regarded herself in the mirror over the washbowl. The only other comparable pain was childbirth. Of that agony, she remembered little; surely not sharper, never so lasting as these headaches.
The noon meal was pleasant.
‘My, but you seem happy today,’ George smiled, and stood awhile in the living room. He glanced in the direction of the dining room, and hearing and seeing no one, he leaned and kissed her.
‘I am very happy,’ she murmured, and George left, whistling.
When Lola had cleared the table, Rose replaced the bottle and turned the key thinking that deadening of pain was hardly worth the shame she felt. Or so she thought then, for when she thought it, she had no pain. She would not go to the bottle again.
The next attack tested her resolve, and she began then those pointless walks over the face of the sagebrush hill, thinking to find relief in the fresh air, in physical exertion; and the walks did help, at first, and it was on a walk, Peter just ahead of her finding a random path through the high sagebrush, that she understood her trouble. For Peter had said, the brother makes you nervous.
Perhaps in his father’s books he had read that nervousness could split your head in two; she was silent, for why burden Peter, who wished to believe that she was happy and respected? But each morning she worried about the noon meal, and each afternoon about the night meal, sick at the thought of sitting with Phil, butt of his silences, his crudities, his scratching himself and snuffling, his talking past her to George. How he pulled his chair out and stepped over it had become an obsession, how he referred to beef as ‘a piece of cow.’ If this caused the shocking headaches, where was the end of it? Why, there was no end of it, to the thrilling pain that would send her again to the buffet, wondering how to replace the whiskey it was so difficult to come by. How long could she go on watering first one and then another bottle before George noticed when sometime he offered a drink to a passing friend?
Where was the end of it? What would she do when the pain struck again, blinding her, when a walk with Peter was no solace — and she knew certain relief lurked behind a small locked door?
How unnatural that she and George live in the same house with the brother! It never worked out; you read that everywhere, and everywhere saw the results. But how challenge George’s affection for his brother, his family? If Phil would but understand, and build a place of his own. Near, if necessary, and a place much better suited to his needs. She understood why Phil would be no happier with her than she with him — but it was absurd to think of her and George’s building a place on some other part of the ranch and leaving Phil in a house of sixteen rooms. No, no, there was no possibility of Phil’s moving and there was no possibility of their moving. Somehow, she had got to speak to Phil, to offer again her friendship, make him understand. After all, the man was a human being. Wasn’t he a human being?
But what must she make him understand? That he was rude and filthy and insulting? Suppose that after the ‘talk’ with him he was to report to his brother that she had called him rude, filthy and insulting? Would George forgive her? God knew, blood was thicker than water, and a wife was no blood kin to her husband.
In following days it struck her that she might be a little mad, that another woman might have known Phil and been unmoved. It was not Phil she was married to. She began a score of imaginary speeches that she heard in her mind as quiet-voiced and reasonable, and in each she began by saying, ‘Phil, why don’t you like me?’
To which he replied, in her mind, ‘Not like you? I don’t understand …’
George himself had said that Phil’s strange silences were just Phil’s ‘way.’
Then, in imagination, Phil would stare out the window — the conversations were in the living room — and Phil would at last smile, and offer his hand in friendship, and there it was. With his friendship, she would welcome overlooking the uncombed hair, the curious odors he exuded, his yanking that chair out from the table and stepping over it, his curious mocking when she played the piano — and above all — his unwashed hands. Those hands! They were Phil! He had every right to play his banjo! It was nervousness had made her not quite sane. The headaches in themselves …
But when she found herself alone in the living room, the setting precisely so, George gone somewhere, Peter working up in his room — each time she lost heart, teetered on a precipice. Walking that tightwire with no net below, marveling that she’d had the audacity even to consider approaching him.
He’s only a man, she would insist to herself, only another with secret problems; but teetering on the precipice, walking that tightwire, she knew he was a great deal more than a human being, or a great deal less; no human speech would move him.
Safe in the pink room, she regained a tiny confidence and reviewed the conversations. It was the sight and sound of him that drained her courage and left her sick and empty — his glance, his eyes, his power when he closed a door, broke open a book; she feared he might break into the cold, derisive laughter she’d heard burst from the bunkhouse when he visited the help, a laughter as jagged and sharp as glass, as keen as lightning; was it directed at her or at her son? And now she had crossed him because of the Indians.
But my God, what could she have done about the Indians? A little grass for an old horse, a few potatoes, a little beef that would spoil anyway. There was an appalling spoilage of meat in the summertime: an entire quarter regularly spoiled and was thrown out as a feast for magpies, dogs, and cats gone wild. It was that, on the one hand; on the other it was a child’s humiliation, a little boy’s. She’d have been craven indeed not to have spoken up; and to tell the truth, Phil’s attitude toward her was the same as before the Indian question.
She had but one chance of speaking with Phil, and that was if she had the courage. And the courage was behind the same locked door. Not quite that: the last time she had removed a bottle, she wrapped it in a towel and hid it in the clothes hamper in the bathroom, reckoning George would not miss a single bottle. And taking the bottle was safer than the dangerous expedient of watering it. And she would replace it.
When she had spoken to Phil (she told herself) she would never again deceive. Once she had spoken, she would confess her curious little theft to George.
George’s absence at the table always pointed up an awkwardness; present or not, his place was set and the meat of the day placed there. Since the departure of the Old Gent, George carved. There was an unvarying pattern of meat, a rigid sequence of meat at the table, and the alert knew exactly how long since a cow was butchered — a cow, yes, for steers were never butchered; steers were more valuable on the market, and no better eating than cows.
The one meat, they said out there, that you could keep on eating and eating was beef.
Right after butchering, maybe that very night, the liver appeared sliced, fried so the edges curled, and served up with onions and bacon. Next came the heart, stuffed with bread, and baked. The ribs lasted many days, boiled or braised, sunk in molten suet. Then a week of roasts — some weighing thirty pounds. Last came the steaks — fried heartlessly in suet and drowned in catsup. Little of the front quarters came to the table, for when the hindquarters were used the flies had had their way in spite of the white shrouds that covered the meat, out the front quarters went, eager maggots and all, to animals and birds.
In that log house human speech was repugnant, the chattering of nincompoops and the babble of fools. Small wonder the timid talked of cabbages and speed of the wind.
Rose could no longer even talk to Peter, but reasoned that the trouble might be that he was sixteen, and a male; she could not understand his dedication to a doubtful future, and the activities such dedication required. Two gophers he had drowned out from their holes he had put in little boxes covered with screen; she couldn’t imagine them as pets; he seemed to like them, and took them to his room. They startled Lola, gone to make Peter’s bed; she reported the gophers healthy — ‘cute little buggers.’ Later, attracted by a ‘funny smell’ she found both gophers dead, their bodies skinned, on a newspaper lying with their paws to heaven.
‘You shouldn’t do it in the house,’ Rose told Peter. ‘No, I mean it.’
He had smiled and put his arm around her. ‘Where would a man get, if he always listened to his mother?’
How he’s grown up, she thought, and looked at her hands. Could she inquire into the fate of the rabbit he had whisked upstairs?
Not only was human speech repugnant in that house, but any sudden sound; the bright clatter of the triangle beside the door of the back dining room made Rose’s pulse race; now it rang a few hours after George’s departure for the bank meeting.
The hired hands burst into the back dining room and she heard their muffled laughter soaring above the insistent voice of a man Lola reported as crazy, who sometimes lingered in the back dining room and told her pretty things.
‘I like to’ve died,’ Lola reported to Rose. ‘Oh, he’s really crazy.’ His craziness drove her to more meticulous care of her hair and the lamp burned long under the curling tongs, the singed smell drifted down the stairs. By the light of the moon the young man said how he saved his money. He would go to Chicago, Lola reported; at a school in the magazines he would repair radios, and make big money.
Lola opened the door to the front dining room bearing a roast she set at George’s vacant place; the laughter from the back dining room followed her. ‘Everything ready,’ she called, and played the chimes beside the door.
This last time, this very last time, Rose had had a drink for courage — well, three drinks over the course of the morning, while she made up her mind. She had masked the odor with a mint. But when Peter came down she kept her distance. His hair was wet from the water he used for grooming. She felt deliciously calm. ‘What have you been doing up there?’
‘Working on a rabbit,’ he said.
‘Phil hasn’t yet come,’ and she had to decide again whether she and Peter should go in and sit down, or wait for Phil — whether it was to her advantage to be sitting at the table with her son beside her, or whether she should wait out of courtesy or protocol. She killed a sharp little resentment that George hadn’t asked her to go with him, for having left her to make a ridiculous decision. What did it matter whether she did go in or didn’t go in? But the world hung on it. What was her life and George’s and Peter’s that such trivia should loom as crucial? Living was so narrow that she brooded nights about what dress to wear the next day; she looked forward each day to the passing of the stage, watching for the dust; she dreaded Sundays when it didn’t run, and there was nothing to look for, nothing to stop her from thinking of Phil in his room, silent but there, his door closed. She felt choked, and tears suddenly stung her eyes.
When the triangle out back was still and the men had settled to their food, she rose, glanced at Peter who leafed through a magazine. He looked at her strangely.
Why would he look at her so? What had she done? She spoke sharply, to test her authority. ‘Peter, I told you I didn’t want you — doing that to rabbits. Not in the house. It’s not much to ask.’ Then she knew the rabbit business was no more important than the stage business, that what-dress-to-wear business. ‘Let’s go to the table.’
Thus, Phil found them at the table.
He gave them a glance. He pulled back George’s chair. He stepped between it and the table, carved meat, and handed it to Peter who handed it to his mother. Phil pushed a plate to Peter, pulled out his chair, stepped over it and sat. No word was spoken. As Phil chewed, he gazed with day-blue eyes across to mountains twelve thousand feet high. All at that table had been watchers of that mountain; most, embarrassed by the silence and longing for the lilt of human speech, talked of the advance or retreat of the snow above the timberline. Rose parted her lips to speak but in sudden revolt refused to pay the mountain homage. Instead, she looked up, having found the clatter of silver painful. ‘Tomorrow,’ she offered, ‘is the longest day.’
‘That’s right,’ Peter said. ‘The longest day in the year.’
‘I like the longer days,’ Rose said.
‘I’d like a little more meat,’ Peter said. ‘Would you like a little more meat, Rose?’
‘More meat?’ She looked at Peter with astonishment; never before had she heard guests or family demand more meat; George, as a good host, saw to it that he offered meat before a desire for it could be expressed. Not only had Peter defied protocol by expressing his wish for meat before it was offered, but in inquiring whether she wished more meat had suddenly assumed the authority of one able to offer it.
Whether Phil would have risen and gone to George’s place and sliced more meat, Rose never knew; for when Peter spoke, he rose, went to George’s place and carved off two pieces. Before Rose could pass her plate, Phil turned a long, reptilian look on Peter, and then on her. He blinked once, pushed back his chair, rose and left the table. She had never heard him excuse himself from the table. Phil made no excuses. But neither had she seen him leave a meal before dessert. Pulse racing, she watched him choose a magazine from the table in the living room and sit, and read.
She looked across the expanse of white cloth at Peter and smiled, uncertain what her smile might mean; she rang the silver bell.
Dessert was a curious concoction known as ambrosia — sliced oranges sprinkled with boxed coconut. She touched her spoon. Then the dish with the oranges was in her lap, then on the floor.
‘I’ll get it,’ Peter said, beside her.
‘I don’t think I want any dessert,’ she said, ‘just now.’ She got up.
‘I don’t either,’ said Peter, and they left the table, Peter to go upstairs, maybe to his rabbit, she to stand before the bookcase where her eyes roamed the titles. She felt calm. She could choose a title as casually as Phil chose a magazine. Strange how calm and nervousness came and went. She chose a book, opened it, read a sentence, then closed it on her finger, as if keeping the place, wanting something in her hands, something to do with her hands while she spoke, that they might not simply hang at her sides.
She turned and spoke to him.
‘Phil,’ she asked, her smile open, friendly and calm, ‘why do you dislike me so?’
Silence fell like a shadow. She glanced into the face of the clock, as if for a clue. It was minutes from striking. Now she looked back at Phil. His eyes were on her, cold as a reptile’s.
‘Please tell me, Phil.’
He said it before she heard it. She was braced for another pause, and instead his voice came. ‘I dislike you,’ he said, ‘because you’re a cheap little schemer, and because you get into George’s booze.’ He looked back at the face of his magazine.
She reached up to touch her hair. Then she turned. As straight as she could carry herself she drifted to the pink bedroom and closed the door behind her. Inside, her shoulders sagged, and she moved, touching furniture toward the big bed. There she lay face down, trying to refuse the words she’d heard. She was quite dry-eyed, and sick with cold although summer drifted in through the window. She lay like one in shock, passively absorbing the sounds of the ranch outside, the clink of the latch on the bunkhouse door, the report of a small rifle as the men played at the noon game of shooting magpies perched warily on the butcher pen, the shouts of triumph or failure — sounds that for a time kept at bay the sound of Phil’s voice, his brutal calm, his chilly eye, the cruelly expressive word ‘booze,’ the scornful ‘cheap’ and her own wooden smile after he had left the table — meant to telegraph to Peter her ability to protect him. She felt suffocated in the void between her intention and her ability, and shattered by loneliness.
Now she heard Phil’s firm footsteps pass the door, go down the hall. The recent protector of Indians, the erstwhile arranger of flowers, brought her fist to her mouth.
Upstairs Peter stood at the dormer window that looked on the sagebrush hill, his narrow thin hands one on top of the other. Turning, he went to the mirror over the bookcase where he kept his father’s books, and there combed his hair carefully. Finished, he continued to watch himself, and dragged his thumb across the teeth of the comb. His lips formed a single word. ‘Phil …’