THE GIFT

“When I was about six or seven years old I fell in love with a young man who occasionally did some work around our place.”

Around Our House

NEARLY EVERY DAY she went out to the big gate and waited for him to come swinging home across the prairie. She climbed to the post and sat there patiently, her hands folded in her lap.

She was a round, apple-cheeked little girl, not very tall for eight. But when she waited for Jeff to come home, she felt slender and tall and fair like a princess. She waited like a princess, quietly and decorously, in her tower atop the gatepost.

If he had been to the lower range, he would come into sight on the rim of the prairie straight out of the west, the sun behind him like a golden chariot wheel, both he and his piebald pony gilded with its fire.

If he had been to the upper range, he would come from the north, out of the foothills of the Winding Stair Mountains. She would not see him as quickly then, for the darkness of the mountains would hide him until he came out of their shadows.

She could never decide which direction she would rather he came from, and she never knew which to expect, for he left home long before she was awake in the morning. If he came from the west, she saw him sooner, but it took longer for him to reach home. It sometimes seemed like an eternity before he grew from a speck on the horizon to a man on a horse. If he came from the north, he emerged suddenly from the shadows into full view, and it was no time at all until he was riding up to the gate, smiling at her, lifting her solemnly from her perch to the saddle in front of him.

She liked the suspense of not knowing. She liked sitting there waiting, facing the west but turning to the north from time to time, trying to guess where he would come from. Sometimes, when she thought she had seen him, she slitted her eyes to make him small and almost invisible again, to prolong the suspense a little longer, to fool herself that it wasn’t he. Those were the days when she was aware of the shortness of time, when she knew, profoundly, that the time of waiting was really the best, that once he had reached the gate and lifted her onto his horse, all too soon they would reach the corral and the moment for which she had waited would be over.

He never waved to her from the prairie, and she never waved to him from the gatepost. She simply waited, and he rode toward her. When he reached the gate, he would smile at her. She knew, truly, that that was the perfect moment, for her love would swell inside her until she felt big with its swelling. She sometimes could not bear to see his lean, dark face lifted toward her, the smile parting his lips until his teeth showed white. She sometimes could not lift her eyes higher than his thin hands holding the reins for fear the swelling love inside her would burst. She felt strangely aquiver then, achey and shivery.

He would smile and say, “Hello, Sallie.”

She would reply, returning his smile, “Hello, Jeff.”

He would open the gate, ride through, close it, and then he would sidle his horse up close to the post and lift her down. He never asked her if she had been waiting long, if she were hot, what she had been doing all day, if she had been a good girl. He never talked foolishly to her at all. Instead he walked the horse slowly to the corral, sometimes never saying a word, sometimes telling her the most beautiful things. “I saw the big brown trout in Beaver Creek today.”

“Was he in the big pool?”

“Yes. He was lazy and sleepy today, just lying there in the water, down close to the bottom, hardly moving at all. I watched him for an hour, and he didn’t move more than a few inches in all that time.”

She knew, then, he had eaten his lunch on the bank of the creek, in the shade of the cottonwood tree, and that he had lain on the grassy bank and watched the trout in the clear, shallow waters of the big pool.

Another time he would tell her the beavers had finished their dam, and she would know he had been working the ravine where the creek flowed small and narrow and fast between the sides of the mountain, and while he talked she could see the beavers, their brown sides glistening with water and sun, their broad tails slapping, their slim, flat heads nosing twigs and branches and mud into place.

Once in the mountains he had seen an eagle. “He was a golden eagle, as gold as the sun, and he sailed down the canyon not more than six feet away from me where I stood. Not a feather on his wings moved, he sailed so stilly, and the sun glinted off his head like a mirror.”

If he had been to the lower ranch, far out on the level prairie, he might tell her, “There was a lizard on a rock today, just sitting there, sunning himself, and a fly came by, and quicker than you can tell it, the lizard’s tongue flicked out and the fly was gone.”

She could see it, the lizard blue-flamed in the sun, the rock gray beneath him, waiting motionlessly until the fly flew past. She could see the incredibly rapid flick of the stiletto tongue, and the settling back, then, into immobility, of the lizard. “Did he go away then?”

“No, he waited for another fly.”

And she knew that Jeff had eaten his lunch in the shade of the rock, and that he had sat, shoulders propped against the granite surface, watching the lizard catch flies.

He never told her that he had been branding calves, that he had been rounding up cattle, that he had been mending fences. She knew that. He was hired to do that, and it was unnecessary for him to tell her. He told her instead what he had seen — a big brown trout, beavers at work, an eagle sailing down the canyon, a lizard catching flies. And when they reached the corral, he slid out of the saddle and lifted her onto the ground. Politely, then, knowing he must take care of his horse, she thanked him and told him good night.

Sometimes she did not have to wait for him. When he worked about the place, he was there all day, and she followed him around, her pink sunbonnet shading her face, her yellow braids swinging beneath it, her short, sturdy legs tireless behind him. She held the staples for him while he nailed wire fencing in place. She held a piece of lumber while he sawed it in half. She held the oilcan while he worked on an old motor. Her father would say, “Jeff, don’t let Sallie get in your way.”

And Jeff would slant his eyes at her under the brim of his hat and smile and say, “She never gets in the way.”

Her father would laugh and pull one of Sallie’s braids. “You like Jeff a lot, don’t you, baby?”

And she would be ashamed of him, for his foolishness and his childishness. She did not like Jeff. She liked dozens of people, but what she felt for Jeff was so different it was as if she herself were a different person with him. She loved Jeff, dearly, wholly, utterly.

Depending upon her mood, he was sometimes a prince, sometimes a knight, sometimes quite satisfactorily just the foreman of her father’s ranch. She never told him or anyone that she planned to marry him when she was grown, or that she planned to grow up very fast to make it possible. She never told anyone that when she waited on the gatepost so patiently, or followed at his heels about the place, she was in training to be his wife.

When her aunt had been planning to be married, she had overheard her mother tell her, “In this country a wife has to do a lot of waiting for her husband — a lot of waiting while he’s off seeing to things, and she has to be a help to him. Remember that, Susan, and don’t be impatient with Jim.”

Sallie remembered it, and she set herself to learn to wait patiently, to hold staples and oilcans and pieces of lumber helpfully. She meant to be a good wife to Jeff when the time came, and it was inconceivable to her that it should not come.

But she never told him so.

There came a day, in the early fall, when she had to say to him, “I am going away to school next week.”

“I know,” he said. “Your father told me. You’re going to stay in town with your aunt and go to school.”

He was cleaning his rifle, and she was holding the gun grease for him. “I expect,” he said seriously, “you will do well in school. You have got a good mind, Sallie.”

She was pleased that he thought so. “I expect I will,” she said.

He rubbed thoughtfully on the gun barrel with an old cloth. “Books are a fine thing to know.”

She nodded. “My father says so.”

“I never got to know enough about books, myself. I’ve always wished I had.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I had to go to work.”

“But you know a lot of things that aren’t in books.”

“Yes, but it would help me, though, to know more that’s in the books. I’d be a better man, I expect.”

Although she did not know in what way Jeff could be better than he was, she did not argue about it. If he said so, it must be true. “I intend to study real hard,” she told him. Since he thought so highly of books, she must apply herself to them.

“You do that. Not everyone has the chance for an education. You must make the most of it.”

As the last days went by, she was conscious of restlessness in herself, not being able to settle happily to any play or task. The impending change hung over her, making her wander about. She came to each familiar chore and thing with the knowledge it was going to be left behind, and she stored up its familiarity to take with her into this new world.

She came finally to the last day and to her goodbye to Jeff. They rode into the corral, and he lifted her off the horse. “I am going tomorrow,” she said.

“Yes.” He did not tell her to be a good girl; he did not remind her again of her duty to the books. He held out his hand, as if she were another man. “I will miss you,” he said.

She took his hand, felt its hard, calloused palm, and for the first time felt tearful and afraid. A lump choked her throat, and she had to swallow twice, very hard. “I will miss you, too,” she told him.

He squatted beside her then, and she looked directly into his eyes, which were now on a level with hers. Wonderingly, she noticed there were little gold flecks in them and that there were fine, weathered wrinkles at the corners. Then he smiled at her, and she wanted terribly to fling her arms about his neck, hang on to him, and let the stinging tears she was holding back have their way. Instead, she continued to search his eyes. “You will be here when I come back?”

“I will be here.”

She sighed. In nine months she would be back home, and he would be here. But then he would be waiting, and she would be riding toward him. From the corner of her eye she saw her father coming. Hurriedly she murmured, “Goodbye now,” and went away into the house.

If he said goodbye, she did not hear him. Her ears were stopped by the beating of her heart.

The nine months were long, but she did not pine or dream overly much. She had always the confidence of her knowledge. They would pass and she would be going home and Jeff would be there. She studied dutifully. She made friends with the other schoolchildren, and played their games with them at recesses and during the noon hour. She helped her aunt with the housework and minded the new baby for her.

But with her whole being she knew that she was faced toward home. She moved through the day and the months with the inner knowledge that she made progress by walking backward. She moved with time, but with her face turned away.

She did not expect to see Jeff during that long time, but twice he came to town. He came in October, when he was taking a shipment of cattle to market in Kansas City, and again at Christmas.

When he came in October, he seemed strange to her at first, dressed as he was in a dark suit and with shirt and tie such as her father and uncle wore. He sat across the room from her on the small sofa by the fire and talked to her uncle about the cattle market, about the hurried ways of the city, about trains coming and going. Gradually, as he talked, the strangeness wore off, and when he spoke directly to her, and smiled at her, he became himself again. “The leaves are beginning to turn,” he told her, “in the mountains. The old cottonwood by the big pool on Beaver Creek is yellow already, and so many leaves have fallen on the water that the whole top of the pool looks like a thick yellow carpet. You’d think you could almost walk on them, there are so many.”

He asked her if she wanted any special thing from the city. “I don’t know,” he told her seriously, “how good I’d be at picking out something for you, but I could try.”

Feeling unaccountably shy before her uncle and aunt, she refused to name anything, but her aunt spoke up. “She’s been wanting some red slippers. There’s a pair in the mail-order catalogue she’s been wishing for. I’ll show you.”

She brought the catalogue, and Jeff studied the picture. Then he nodded and had her stand on a piece of brown paper while he drew the outline of her feet. “So I’ll be sure and get the right size,” he told her.

She did not know when he came back from the city, for he must have gone directly home to the ranch without stopping in town, and nothing at all was said of the red slippers. Sadly, she thought he had forgotten, but without effort she forgave him. He’d been very busy, she told herself.

At Christmas, though, he came with a message and gifts from her parents. The message said they were sorry they could not come to spend the holidays in town with her as planned, but her mother was ill. The gifts were loving and thoughtful ones — a beautiful new doll (for they did not know she was too old for dolls), a plaid taffeta dress and a soft, silky fur muff and cap. Jeff gave them to her, and when he had admired them with her, he handed her another package, which he had laid on the table when he came in. “Mine looks kind of skimpy alongside your folks’ presents, but I thought you might like it.”

He had wrapped it clumsily, in red paper. Slowly she took off the wrappings, her heart beating suffocatingly up into her throat. It was a small chest he had made her from cedarwood, just big enough for ribbons and handkerchiefs, and he had carved her name, “Sallie,” in the top. She put her nose down to smell the sweet, fresh smell of the wood, and rubbed her hand over its satiny top. She could see him working on the chest, evenings maybe, in the bunkhouse, choosing the pieces of cedar, careful to select those with both red and yellow in them, whittling out each piece, fitting it to the next one, sanding them down to this soft smoothness, and then finally, with his knife, perhaps, cutting her name in the top. She could see his hands, thin, brown, holding the knife. The chest made every other gift seem small and insignificant. She touched it gently, as she felt she always must.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” he asked her then.

Surprised, she looked up at him. “Is there something inside?”

He nodded, and when she lifted the lid, there were the red slippers, a little crowded, but he had managed to wedge them in. It was too much that he should have made her a cedarwood chest. The tears almost came, but she blinked them back. He came to her rescue. “Try your slippers and see if they fit.”

He busied himself to give her time, drawing up a chair and settling a cushion for her to rest her feet on. The slippers fitted exactly, and as she swung them, eyeing their twinkling toes, her mood shifted, and she felt as bubbly and light as the slippers. Jeff looked at them, his head cocked on one side. “Looks to me,” he said, “as if those were dancing shoes. I don’t know if they’d stand up to trudging around the ranch much.”

“They’re for Sunday best,” she told him. “I only mean to wear them on very special occasions.”

He nodded. “That’s what I thought they were for.”

Then he swung up his hat and put it on rakishly. “I’ve got Christmas business of my own,” he confided. He looked at her, his flecked eyes larky and happy. “Merry Christmas, Sallie.”

She could not at all find the words to tell him thank you. All she could say was, “Merry Christmas, Jeff.”

At the door he turned and spoke again. “I saw wild turkeys in the canyon yesterday. A whole flock of them. I almost didn’t see them, they were so near the color of the leaves, brown and speckled. But the old tom gobbled and gave himself away.”

Thus he added one more gift to her merry Christmas.

Those were the two times that broke the long winter. In May her father came for her, and when they headed home for the ranch, her turnabout feeling left her, and she felt as if for the first time since she had left it she was faced in the right direction.

She asked questions eagerly, about her mother, about the house, about the cows and horses. She circled all around the subject she most wanted to hear about, knowing she did not really want to hear about it until she could hear it from Jeff himself. Several times she came near the edge of a question concerning him. “Has the herd at the lower ranch wintered well?”

“Fine. There’ll be a good shipment this year.”

“Has there been enough rain this spring to bring out the pastures on the upper range?”

“Plenty. Beaver Creek has been running full all spring.”

Once her father started to say something of his own accord. “Jeff has —” he began, but she forestalled him. “Oh, look, there’s a prairie dog.”

She did not want to hear. It was her old game of suspense, not knowing, waiting a little longer for the perfect moment. He would be there, waiting. Not on the gatepost as she had waited, but there, somewhere about the place, and she would soon see him, and he would smile at her and say, “Hello, Sallie.” She smoothed the folds of her plaid taffeta dress and bent forward to see the tips of her red slippers. He would know, when he saw them, that this was a very special occasion.

He was there at the gate, waiting, to open it for them. And he smiled at her, and at the sight of the smile on his dark face her love swelled up, as always, making her heart feel tight and ready to burst. He said, “Hello, Sallie,” and he helped her out of the buggy. He saw the red slippers, too. She saw his eyes drop to them, and when he looked back up at her, his smile widened.

He did not say anything before her father, though, as if he knew he must not. The red slippers were just between themselves.

Instead, he went to help her father with her trunk, and she stood, waiting, looking about at the familiar buildings, glad and happy to be at home again. At the back of the orchard, then, she saw a new building, a small frame house, painted white. “What is that?” she asked.

“That’s Jeff’s new house. He’s going to get married next week. Couldn’t have him bringing a bride home to the bunkhouse.”

In the short years of her life, nine of them, she had known what it was to be cold, for on the prairie the wind and snow blew icy cold straight out of the north, unimpeded. But never before had she felt the kind of cold that froze into her bones at that moment. It was as if the cold started in the marrow of her bones and spread slowly into her flesh, congealing it and turning it hard as stone.

She could not move, and so she stood, frozen, and waited as her father and Jeff, laughing together now, carried her trunk into the house. She saw the rough bark of the locust tree under which she stood, and she heard the bees humming among the blooms. She smelled the heady sweetness of the blooms, and she felt the bulk of the house behind her. She saw the sun lying blindingly bright on the grass beyond the shade of the tree, and she saw the fences and felt an ant crawling on her ankle. But she really saw only the small frame house in the orchard, and she really felt only the coldness between her shoulders.

She heard the screen door slam, and in a moment Jeff was standing beside her again. She found that she could move, then, and she squared around to face him. “You said you would be here when I came back,” she accused.

“I am here,” he said quietly.

“No,” she told him.

“But I am,” he insisted.

“No,” she repeated.

He squatted beside her as he had done when she told him goodbye. He put his hands on her shoulders, and she could not bear them. She twisted away. “Sallie, what is wrong? Have I done something? Aren’t we friends anymore?”

She looked at him strangely. “We weren’t friends. We weren’t ever friends.”

“I thought we were. I thought we were good friends.”

His eyes still had the small golden flecks in them, and with anguish she thought of this woman he was going to marry, who would all her life look into them, and at whom he would smile, and whom he would tell about the brown trout and the eagle and ’the lizard. “Why are you going to be married?” she burst out angrily at him. “How could you be? I loved you! I was going to marry you!”

His face sobered suddenly, and he looked away from her, one knee going down to the ground to brace himself. He did not say anything for a long, long time, and, waiting, she tried to regain her composure. It shocked her that she had burst out at him and confided those hopes to him. She had never meant him to know until the time came, but she had blurted them out, in her pain, and it outraged her to be so betrayed by her own feelings. She waited, not knowing what he would say, or if he would say anything, not knowing why she waited, except, perhaps, from habit of waiting.

When he spoke finally, he did not remind her that she was only a little girl, that she did not know the meaning of love, that someday she would grow up and meet a fine boy her own age and marry him and be happy forever after. He did not tell her she would learn to love his wife, that she must visit them in the new house. He did not say to her, laughingly, that she would forget all this, or that if she did remember it, in time, she would laugh at the memory. He said none of these expected and wholly untrue things to her. Instead he said, “I love you, too, Sallie, and if things were different, I would feel very honored to have you marry me. I love you so much, Sallie, that even though I am going to marry someone else, I will never love her in quite the same way. All my life you will be my dearest love, my unobtainable love.”

He turned to face her then and gathered her very close in his arms. She felt the hard strength of them tight about her, and the roughness of his cheek against hers. She cried, then, not stormily as a child cries, but quietly, as a woman cries, and he allowed her tears for a long time. Then he spoke again. “You see, Sallie, you are a princess, and a princess can never marry a commoner. A princess can only marry a prince.”

“You are a prince to me.”

“That’s only because you love me. I am the commonest sort of commoner.”

His analogy was just reasonable enough to be nearly believable. Dimly she understood that because she was her father’s daughter and would someday inherit all these vast lands and herds, and because he was a cowhand, rough and unlettered, there was a likeness to the princess in the storybooks. He loved her, but he could never marry her. She clutched him tighter, wanting to believe. “But you do love me? You always have and you always will?”

“I do love you. I always have and I always will.”

“The most?” She whispered it.

“The most.”

Gently, tenderly, and even proudly he denied his deepest love and presented the denial as his finest gift to restore a small girl’s sense of dignity, to heal a small girl’s sense of treachery.

She wiped her eyes on his shirt sleeve and drew away from his arms. She looked at him, the dark, sober face, the flecked, troubled eyes. And she recognized the denial for what it was. Sadly she knew she had compelled it. He loved this woman he was going to marry, for he would not be marrying her otherwise. She guessed that his Christmas business, which had made him so gay, had been with her.

But instinctively she recognized also the splendor and the kindness of his denial. And since she had willed it from him and her pride was restored by it, she must not now, she saw, do him the dishonor of refusing it. She must not shame him by unbelief. Gently, then, tenderly and bravely, she received it. With pain still shining in her eyes, with coldness still chill between her shoulders, she took his face between her hands and kissed him sweetly on the forehead. “We will always love each other,” she told him, “but we must always hide our broken hearts.”

He closed his eyes at the touch of the cool, soft young lips, and when he opened them she was walking away, the red slippers, forgotten, twinkling in the sun. With a strange sense of loss he watched her, feeling oddly that at that moment, for him as well as for her, it was very nearly true.

(This story was published originally in Good Housekeeping, January 1957.)