Billy Joe Elkins was thinking about sex. The fact that he had an erection most of the time didn’t help. The darn thing was just semipermanently stiff. When he thought about sex, it got stiffer.
Unfortunately, these days he thought about sex during most of his waking moments. He fantasized, speculated about how it would feel, wanted to do it so badly that he didn’t know how he was going to make it to the next minute.
Needless to say, he wasn’t thinking about sex as an abstract concept. The minds of seventeen-year-old males don’t work that way. He was thinking about sex with Melanie Naroditsky.
Melanie, with the long brown legs and golden arms and velvet lips and ripe, firm breasts…and those long brown lashes that stroked her cheeks when she lowered her head and batted them so innocently. Melanie, with the almost inaudible moan that escaped her when he caressed the small of her back, with the tiny beads of sweat that appeared on her upper lip when he brushed his fingertips along her thigh…
Melanie Naroditsky was driving him wild.
Of course she well knew the turmoil she was causing in this young male animal who hovered around her like a fly over a honey pot, and she took pleasure in it. Great pleasure. Seventeen-year-old males aren’t normally very sensitive to the emotional state of females, but Melanie’s receptiveness had penetrated to the testosterone-soaked brain of Billy Joe Elkins and given him some big ideas.
Tonight. Tonight was the night.
This Friday morning in old lady Salmaron’s English class he reached that momentous decision. Melanie was at her desk, bent over her English book, following along in the text while Lath-Legs Salmaron read poetry, incomprehensible gobbledygook about some dude named J. Alfred Prufrock. This “poem,” Billy Joe thought, didn’t sound like any “love song” he had ever heard. Had he been writing it, it would have come out a lot different.
Now Melanie glanced over her shoulder and met his eyes. A zillion volts arced across the space between the lovers, then she lowered her eyes again to the text. Billy Joe gasped for air.
Tonight!
With his organ pressed firmly against the zipper of his jeans, he began making serious plans. The whole object of his campaign would be to break down her natural resistance. He assumed she would have to be seduced. She wasn’t that kind of girl.
The realization that he would be ruining a virtuous girl to satisfy his primal lust caused him exactly two seconds of angst. He sneaked another glance at the object of his passion, still bent over her book, her hair obscuring her face, and the twinge passed.
Just thinking about it made Billy Joe’s palms perspire. Stop, he told himself. Stop thinking about the payoff and figure out how you’re going to get there.
He wiped his sweaty hands on his jeans and pretended to concentrate on the words on the page before him as old lady Salmaron droned on and on.
That a wonderful girl like Melanie might be interested in sex, that she might be contemplating the prospect of sex with him, were thoughts that had never once crossed his fevered mind, which was fortunate. Had he but an inkling about the true state of Melanie’s emotions, the resulting priapic frenzy might have done his health serious harm.
When the bell rang, he gathered his books and timed his charge for the door to coincide with Melanie’s arrival.
Out in the hall he grinned at her. He thought it was a grin, but it was a leer. Melanie didn’t seem to mind. She gazed into his eyes with the sincere enthusiasm that makes youth golden.
“Wasn’t that poem fantastic?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah. Sure.”
“It reminded me so much of us. Every line. It was as if Eliot could see into our hearts.”
“Who?” Billy Joe asked, slightly disconcerted. He sincerely hoped no one knew exactly what he had been thinking during English class. Just now he purposely held his books in front of his fly to conceal his loaded and ready condition.
“The poet. T. S. Eliot.”
“Oh, him.”
“Weren’t you moved?”
“Of course,” Billy Joe lied. Since he knew a thing or two about girls, he added, “Just looking at you moves me.”
“You’re soooo sweet,” Melanie said, and flashed her lashes, which made his temples throb.
“Tonight, after the football game. Will you meet me outside the locker room?”
“See you then, lover,” she whispered.
Melanie Naroditsky ran a finger along his chin, then dashed away down the hall. Billy Joe watched her go. When she was out of sight, he took a deep, deep breath and exhaled slowly. Ooooh, boy!
Matilda Elkins was in her bedroom sorting laundry when she heard Anne drive away. Last night Hayden and Billy Joe went to the Harris house to retrieve Anne’s car. Anne asked them to go, so they did, without even glancing at Matilda.
This morning when she heard the car leave Matilda finished sorting the clothes, then went into the bathroom and locked the door.
She felt empty. Deep in her heart she suspected that Hayden’s philandering was her fault. Just what she had done wrong, or more likely should have done but hadn’t, she didn’t know. She had worried about that, fretted it, and at last concluded that she couldn’t identify her error.
Finally she realized that she herself was the problem. She had never been assertive. She was a woman who was content to follow her man through life, go where he leads, defer to his wishes. Her mother had been like that, and Matilda thought she had inherited her personality.
It was plain that Hayden expected her to acquiesce in this new arrangement, to tolerate Anne’s presence in the guest bedroom. That was bad enough, but Anne Harris also expected her to accept it, and that was galling. She wanted to assert herself, to force Hayden and Anne to…to do something. But what?
Her instincts and experience failed her completely. She had no idea what she wanted to happen.
Hayden had betrayed her. Nothing could change that fact. It had been done and could not be undone. And deep within her she knew that if she were somehow different, that event would not have happened.
She examined her reflection in the mirror, looking for the flaw that had to be there. The familiar image stared back. The flaw was hidden, buried deep. Whatever it was, it was a latent defect, but a defect all the same.
Matilda had cried herself out. She had cried for almost three days in the privacy of the bathroom and now she didn’t have another tear left in her. As she cried she had toyed with the idea of killing Hayden and Anne. God knows they both richly deserved it, yet she knew she wasn’t capable of the rage that murder would require. Finally, reluctantly, she had abandoned it.
Hysteria had its attractions, too, and several times in the last few days she thought she was about wound up enough. But she knew she could never pull that off, either. It would be too transparent. To have Anne Harris see through her best hysterical fit and laugh would be mortifying, quite impossible to live with.
Suicide was an option. She was certainly depressed enough. Sleeping pills would do the trick, and there was a whole bottle in the medicine cabinet. Just swallow them down, drift gently off to sleep, never to awaken and have to look again at Hayden…or Anne. Never again feel like a cracked, empty vase.
Matilda rejected suicide when she realized that she would merely be smoothing the path for Anne. In five years everyone would forget the chronology and assume that Anne moved in after crazy, demented Matilda did away with herself and left poor Hayden devastated. Matilda had a keen appreciation of the length of her neighbors’ attention spans and the quality of their memories.
When all other possibilities had been rejected, that left only divorce. A good, juicy divorce, with a team of piranha lawyers ripping the flesh off Hayden and relieving him of every penny he had or ever hoped to get.
Yet a divorce would merely throw Hayden into Anne’s arms. Here, I don’t want him. He’s penniless and worthless and he’s yours.
Not that Anne would care about the state of Hayden’s wallet. After all, she owned half the bank. Ed’s father, Lane Harris, left half the stock to Ed and half to Anne when he died two years ago. Poor Lane, he must have been crazy as a bedbug in his last years, to bequeath half that bank to that brazen tramp!
No. Divorce wouldn’t work, either.
Matilda stared at herself in the mirror and wished she could cry some more.
The tears wouldn’t come.
Verlin Ice’s home was an ancient Victorian that desperately needed paint. In fact, it was difficult to tell from the weathered gray boards just what color the Ices might have favored back when the world was young.
The house sat well back from the road on a small knoll, across a creek with a dilapidated bridge that groaned a warning when Sam Neely inched across in the police cruiser. He parked in the yard in front of the porch.
A lithe, blond goddess came through the open doorway and stopped on the porch at the top of the steps. She was dressed in a simple frock, with bare legs and bare feet. The wind stirred her long, thick, golden hair and swirled it across her face as Neely approached the porch.
Sam Neely, twenty-three years old and fresh out of the police academy, couldn’t take his eyes off her. It wasn’t polite to stare, but he couldn’t help himself. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Ever, even in the movies.
She used a hand to brush the hair back from her eyes, a futile gesture. Neely stood mesmerized.
She smiled gently. “You brought Goofy back, I see.”
Neely gestured toward the cruiser and tried to talk, only to find that his tongue had the flexibility of a two-by-four. The thought tugged at his mind that he should tell this beautiful woman of Goofy’s latest transgression. Standing in the grass looking up at Venus on the porch as the soft breeze pressed the dress against her body, he finally understood what Lester Storm had been trying to tell him—Goofy’s peeping didn’t matter.
“My name is Crystal. What’s yours?”
Crystal Ice. Well, Crystal Ice, you and I—
“What’s your name?” she asked again, her amusement obvious.
Name. Name! Get it out, boy. “Samuel Allen Neely.”
“You want to see my father, I suppose?”
“Oh…” If he didn’t find someone to talk to about something he was going to have to get back in the cruiser and drive away. “Sure. He around?”
“Out in the barn.” She pointed.
Reluctantly Sam Neely moved in that direction. He took several steps before he managed to tear his eyes away from Crystal Ice and glance at the ground to keep from tripping.
Verlin Ice sat perched on a hay bale in the sun several feet in from the open door of the barn. His nut-brown, weathered face wore the stubble of several days’ growth of gray beard, which matched the boards of his house. He was a smallish man, clad in tattered overalls and a faded blue shirt. As Neely approached he was arranging a chew of tobacco in his mouth. With his mouth full, he held out the pack toward the state trooper.
“No, thanks. I don’t use tobacco.”
Verlin Ice rolled the quid around with his tongue, got it placed just so, then spit a dark brown stream of juice into the fine, dry dirt at his feet. Some of the juice dribbled down his chin; he didn’t seem to notice.
“Don’t trust a man who don’t use tobacco,” he said matter-of-factly. “Too uppity.”
That wasn’t very polite, Neely thought. Slightly irritated, he said, “You’re working hard this morning, I see.”
“Yep. Working hard at living, so I am. Come out here for a chew ’bout ever’ day ’bout this time. Women don’t like me spittin’ in the house, so they don’t.”
“Most of them are persnickety that way,” Neely observed.
“Funny that the good Lord made men and women folk so different.”
“Yep.”
“Guess He got a good laugh over it. If I’d been Him, I’d still be laughin’.”
“Maybe He is.”
Verlin Ice spit again. Juice dribbled off his chin onto his shirt and overalls. He concentrated on his chewing.
The barn smelled good, smelled of bovine bodies and manure and sweet hay. The foundations were of cut stone, the uprights and beams squared-up timbers that still wore adze marks. Neely tired of standing and lowered himself onto a hay bale. It was surprisingly comfortable. He sat studying the way the massive beams fitted together.
“I don’t mean to rush you,” Verlin said after a while, “but we done discussed philosophy and theology, so I guess we done our social visitin’. Have you worked around to what you came for yet?”
“I brought Goofy back.”
“Thanks.”
“He was over at Mrs. Carcano’s house this morning, peeping in a window at her daughter.”
“Carcano?”
“The new preacher at the Eden Chapel.”
“Goofy does that now and then,” Verlin said, and let it go at that.
After a bit Neely asked, “Has he got a last name? Goofy?”
Verlin puzzled on it. He worked on his chew and spit before he answered. “Figures that he does, but I don’t know what it is.”
“He’s not your son?”
“Well, now, he is and he ain’t. Didn’t come blessed with wedlock, so to speak.”
“I see.”
“That’s good. People rarely do.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed about. Isn’t all that uncommon.”
“Yeah, I guess it’s not,” Verlin admitted. Then his voice strengthened. “Me and Minnie had a boy. His name is Jirl. He lives up the road, near to Vegan, so he does. Fine boy. He come exactly nine months to the day after me and Minnie tied the knot. Then it was nearly ten years before his sisters started being born.”
“I see.”
“It wasn’t like me and Minnie weren’t trying, you understand. That’s just the way life worked out.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Jirl’s got a wife and a good farm and near two hundred head of cows and works hard at it. Comes down from time to time and looks in on me and his ma, helps with the chores. Checks on his sisters. Tries to give them some advice ever’ now and then on men. They listen respectful ’cause he’s their older brother and they like him, but I don’t think they pay much mind to what he has to say. None at all, near as I can tell.”
The reference to the Ice girls and men intrigued Neely, but he refused to be distracted. “So when did Goofy come to live here?”
Verlin stirred the quid around in his mouth thoughtfully before he spoke. “Years and years ago. He was mighty small, I recollect.”
“Why did you take him in?”
The answer came quickly this time. “Where else was he goin’ to go? Just a little boy, and even then you could see he was gonna be simple. What else could we do?”
Neely couldn’t think of anything more to ask. He had, he sensed, all the information that Verlin Ice was willing to give.
Flies buzzed pleasantly in the barn, birds chirped high in the loft, and a huge black heifer stared at him from her enclosure as Verlin chewed leisurely and spit from time to time. A cat wandered over and rubbed against Neely’s leg. He petted it, scratched behind its ears.
Then a grizzled, flop-eared brindle hound wandered in. “Hey, Sam,” Verlin said pleasantly.
With a start Neely realized the old man was greeting the dog.
The hound collapsed in the dirt. He stretched, then lay full length on his side and closed his eyes.
Verlin’s sun-cured face crinkled into a gentle smile as he sat looking at the dog. Almost as if he could feel the man’s affection, the dog whacked its tail three or four times in the dirt. Not another muscle stirred.
Verlin leaned back against a post.
“Dogs and women are a lot alike,” he said.
The obvious similarity between Verlin Ice and his hound seemed to Trooper Neely more apropos, but he held his tongue.
“Now you take that ol’ coon hound, there,” Verlin continued. “To look at, ol’ Sam ain’t much, just a worthless, worn-out dog. But when I look at him I see the best coon hound that ever ran the woods on a misty summer night hot on a trail. He understands me and I understand him. We’re in tune with each other, don’t you see.”
Verlin paused to give his chew some attention. “Minnie’s a lot like that,” he added finally.
“I haven’t met your wife,” Neely informed his host.
Verlin continued, “You look at her, you see an average-looking old woman who’s been down the road and put on some years. Me? I see the prettiest girl who ever grew up in this Eden country. She’s raised kids through good times and bad, she’s spooned food into all of us when we were sick and wiped my bottom for me when I couldn’t. She’s worked hard for so many years I guess we lost count. She’s everything…She’s just the best human on the face of this earth, so she is.”
Trooper Neely didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t accustomed to hearing such a fervid affirmation of love for a woman from another man. He scratched his nose to hide his embarrassment, which didn’t seem to bother Verlin Ice an iota.
Finally Neely got to his feet and brushed bits of hay from his trousers. “Oh, my name’s Sam, too. Same as your dog. Sam Neely. Nice meeting you.”
“It’s good to get to know you early on,” Verlin replied, “seeing as how you’ll probably be out here a lot sniffing around the girls.”
Neely flushed.
“Nothing to be embarrassed about. Chased a few skirts in my time, so I did. Boys interested in girls and girls interested in boys is why humans ain’t extinct, despite the preachers’ best efforts.”
“I don’t think—” Neely began.
Verlin Ice cut him off. It was too nice a day to debate religion and he wished he hadn’t mentioned it. “Minnie will want to know your intentions when she gets you cornered, but don’t let that bother you none. She frets all the fellas thataway. She don’t mean no harm by it.”
Sam Neely didn’t know what to say.
“Get along now, young fella. Go back to work. You’re standing in my sun.”
Trooper Neely went.
The day girl had just come out onto the porch to remove the lunch tray when Sarah Armbrecht heard a car laboring up the hill through the trees. The drive ran through the forest for a half mile and the sound carried.
Sarah could still hear well, which was, she thought, ironic. She had never enjoyed music, preferring instead the whisper of wind in the pines and the songs of birds, yet her second husband had been a professor of music and an orchestra conductor. He had ended up deaf as a post by the time he was sixty and had been dead for thirty years. At the age of ninety-five, she was still listening to the sounds of the forest. Amazingly, she could still hear a leaf caress a windowpane.
There wasn’t much life left in her ancient body, she well knew, but what remained she savored.
“There’s someone coming,” she told the girl. “We’ll have tea, I think.”
The day girl paused as she checked that the edges of the blanket were tucked around Sarah’s legs, listened for a moment, then shook her head in wonder. She fussed a little more over the shawl around the old woman’s shoulders, then took the tray and pill dispensers back inside.
Lunch, Sarah reflected wryly, half a pear and a sliced tomato, and the occasion for the noon pills—all eight.
The car stopped in the parking area and she heard the door slam. Soon she heard someone climbing the stairs. A woman, by the sound of her tread. Then she saw her.
“Hello, Granny Sarah.”
Ahh, Anne Harris, her grandson Ed’s wife. “Hello, Anne. So good of you to come.” She could make out Anne’s face fairly well when she was seated in a chair only six feet away. “You look stunning this morning.”
“Thank you. I felt I had to come see you. Ed and I are having difficulty, and you will undoubtedly hear about it. I wanted you to hear it from me.”
“You don’t have to explain your life to anyone, Anne.”
“I know. Perhaps because you don’t judge, I care about what you think. You are one of the few.”
“Let’s have some tea first. If you haven’t yet had lunch, may I suggest sliced tomatoes on toast? Moses Grimes brought them to me from his garden. They are at their peak just now, and they are delicious.”
“I didn’t know you knew Moses.”
“When he was a young man, he used to mow my lawn. Then one summer he eloped to San Francisco with a doctor’s daughter who wanted to see the bright lights. Apparently it came as quite a shock when she announced she was a lesbian. Ran him off and moved in with a famous woman novelist. Moses eventually returned to Eden.”
“Moses Grimes?” Anne asked, stifling a laugh.
“Moses Grimes!”
A vision of solid, conservative, slightly overweight and balding Moses Grimes crushed by love amid the cutting-edge moderns of San Francisco stayed with Anne as she ate several slices of toast covered with slices of ripe, red tomato dusted with just a trace of salt. “This is very good,” she said to her hostess with her mouth full.
After the day girl had removed the lunch tray and both ladies were sipping tea, the object of the visit could be postponed no longer. “Ed caught me in bed with another man.”
Anne told the story rather well, she thought, covering the salient facts and not minimizing her guilt. Nor did she dwell on it. Granny Sarah would find sackcloth and ashes quite repugnant.
Sarah Armbrecht listened in silence. A few questions occurred to her, but she elected not to ask them. Anne was telling her what she wanted her to know, and that was enough.
When Anne fell silent, Sarah Armbrecht poured herself another cup of tea. It was just the way she liked it, strong and hot.
“Why did Lane give you half the bank?”
Anne’s eyes reflected her surprise. Of all the things she thought Granny Sarah might ask, that wasn’t on the list. “He never discussed it with me. I was as surprised as anyone.”
“Lane was his own man,” Sarah said. “I remember when he was a boy…oh, so long ago. I bore him when I was twenty-eight. I raised him, watched him grow, select a wife, attended his children’s weddings, watched him build that bank into one of the three largest independents in the state, watched while he died of cancer at the age of sixty-five. His whole life was encompassed in mine.”
The teacup almost slipped from her fingers as the memories crashed over her like a tidal wave. That was the thing about old age that was so disconcerting—you had so very many memories and they came flooding back whether you wanted them or not, whether you were ready or not. Memories of joy and pain, of hope and despair, of love and…No, the hate and bitterness of the past had died, leaving only the ache of love of something gone. For they were all gone now, all those people she had loved so very much, her parents, her brothers and sisters, her husbands, her sons. She was left here to mourn them all.
Perhaps she had loved them too much.
She still loved them, yet they were gone forever.
When Sarah could speak again she said, “Parents shouldn’t outlive their children. Children should bury their parents, not vice versa.”
She managed to raise the cup to her lips. The warm liquid helped. When she felt completely in control, she told her guest, “I thought Lane would leave all the stock to Ed, his only son. As you know, his daughter married and moved to California. She’s comfortably well off, I believe. Never had any interest in the bank. So when Lane divided the bank between you and Ed in his will, I found that hard to understand. I thought I knew Lane, but he surprised me one last time.”
She put the teacup on the tray and didn’t pick it up again.
“I have seen so much of life. When I was young I never ever dreamed how it would actually be. I’ve played all the roles—child, young girl in love, bride, mother, widow, mother of the bride, mother of the groom, grandmother, great-grandmother, old woman, old, old woman. Some of the roles I’ve played several times. Courted, married and buried three husbands. Had five children, only one of whom is still alive, Martha. Jack died of typhoid when he was eleven. Two of the boys died in a car wreck on their way to their father’s funeral. Lane died of cancer. I have eleven grandchildren and, so far, eight great-grandchildren.
“I have lived it…lived all of it.”
“Grandmother Sarah,” Anne said, “I’m sorry I brought you my troubles.”
“Oh, no, child. Don’t apologize. You are human, as we all are. I’m sure you did what you thought best. Continue to do that.”
“But I don’t know what I should do.”
“Then do nothing just now,” the old lady said gently. “Ponder on it. Eventually a course will become plain to you.”
“I have hurt Ed.”
“And Matilda Elkins.”
Anne snorted. She thought Matilda’s troubles were of her own making, and had no sympathy to give away.
“But hurting other people is inevitable,” Sarah Armbrecht continued thoughtfully. “It is part of life. We must love, we must endure the hurts that loved ones unavoidably inflict, and we must continue to love. If there is another way, I don’t know of it.”
The day girl appeared in the doorway. “Mrs. Armbrecht, it’s time for your nap.”
Anne retrieved her purse and stood.
“Come see me again, Anne,” Sarah said. “Think about why Lane left you half the bank.”
“I’ll be back soon,” Anne replied. She kissed the elderly woman’s cheek.