Callie and I leant up against the sides of a lawn jockey in front of the big house at Lower Wye—the first time we’d been alone together without Hoofers or horses. We’d known each other a week. Frogs jumped across the gravel driveway and disappeared into the dark. The grass was damp under our legs.
Her hand was freezing, she didn’t feel the cold. We watched the lamplit shadow of the boss’s wife sewing curtains in the attic, three storeys up the bricks and creeper. We waited for her to go to bed so we could have the run of the garden. The boss had gone to New York City.
“I left home when I was twelve,” Callie said quietly. “They were after me for lighting fires.”
“What kind of fires?”
“If you drag a dead branch burning through a dry grass field, it lights up behind you like a trail of turpentine.”
“When I left home I rode so far I wore my pony’s feet down,” I said.
“Why’d you go?” she asked.
“My mother was dead.” I looked up at the woman in the window, it reminded me of her. “I used to watch her sew at night, except she only had a kerosene lamp.” She used sacks and flannel for curtains.
With Callie you don’t have to pretend your family has money. “She had her things sent from Europe by boat, they came through the desert on the backs of camels, but most of them broke,” I said.
“Her things or the camels?” asked Callie. I smiled but I didn’t answer. I looked back up at the shape in the window. My mother would have loved it up there, sewing on a treadle machine, cutting slipcovers and curtains from English chintzes; helping the groundsman arrange the plantings for the seasons, training vines along the arbour trellis. Gardening gloves and secateurs, flowers growing wild beside the road.
“Last weekend I won the indoor puissance in Baltimore,” Callie said. “They want me to join the U.S. team. They train at Boulderbrook.”
“How high’d you jump?” I asked.
“Six four.”
“I had a horse in Australia called Jinglebob,” I told her. “We jumped six foot seven in the high jump at Wangaratta. Where’s Boulderbrook?”
“New York.”
The attic lamp went off and we waited for Shackelton’s wife to turn off the downstairs lights and go to sleep. It felt good to stroke Callie’s fingers. I didn’t want her to leave.
“My father had a girlfriend. She lived on the place, but not in the house,” I said.
“My mother was my father’s girlfriend,” said Callie. “They never bothered to marry.”
When the house went dark the soft-lit swimming pool water shone against the sky.
“Where’s Hoofers?” I asked her.
“Tuesday Bible study,” she said.
Callie went to the pool, she wanted to go in with no clothes on. In the raw, she called it. She shed her work jeans and shirt, dived in silently, the water hardly breaking. She swam down the length underneath, her arms by her sides, without coming up for breath. Up the other end she got out, not afraid of me seeing her. She nodded like I should do the same.
I dipped my fingers in. “The water’s cold as Christmas,” I whispered. Clouds ran high, lit by the moon. I didn’t want her knowing I couldn’t swim.
Callie stood pigeon-toed and hugged herself dripping. I took her clothes to her, she was tiny without them. I blew on her fingers to warm them, looked into her face and we kissed. Her hair was wet, her lips cold. As I closed my eyes I imagined her lighting fields on fire.