Kate heard Bess leave. She was too upset with the girl to call out, to ask where she was going or when she would be home. Now she regretted it. She hated anger between herself and Bess and Harriet. When they quarreled, she did not want one of them to leave, especially to go in a car, without someone calling out, “Be careful,” and someone else answering, “I won’t be late.”
She lay fully clothed on the bed and dozed. About ten she woke breathless with panic, then weepy with self-pity because she was helpless.
“Calm down,” she whispered. But panic, she knew, did not yield to reason. Sometimes it yielded to light or movement.
Inching toward the edge of the bed, she willed her legs over the side. In the bathroom she washed her face and slipped into the soft muslin gown, a creeping uneasiness replacing the panic.
Bess had been furtive today, watchful, and guilty in her manner. Was she guilty of something beyond her horrid behavior toward Harriet? Something to do with the dark blue car?
Hooking her cane around the cross brace of a straight-back chair, Kate dragged it the few feet across the linoleum floor to the bathroom sink and sat down, resting her arm along the cool surface of the porcelain sink.
Should she call Donna Olson’s house? Was Bess even with Donna? No, she wouldn’t call, not at this hour. If Bess was there, she was safe; if she wasn’t, Kate had no idea where she might be. The Dakota Ballroom had no dances on Thursday. At length Kate braced herself on the sink and pushed up from the chair.
The air was cooler downstairs. The windows were all open, and the doors as well. A breeze might come up later. Maybe she would sleep on the daybed on the front porch.
With the dim light of the street lamp to guide her, she settled into a wicker rocker on the porch. The elms, faithful nocturnal companions, twitched in discontented sleeplessness, rough leaves whispering, relaying messages borne to them on the heavy night air. Kate sat rigid, alert, listening.
At midnight DeVore Weiss’s car pulled up in front of the house. Kate looked away and debated whether she should try to creep into the living room. She didn’t want Harriet thinking that she was spying. But the pain in the back of her head had returned, an elephant’s foot crushing her skull. She closed her eyes and waited.
Fifteen minutes later Harriet and DeVore got out of the car and, conversing softly, made their way arm in arm up the walk to the door. She had not turned him down.
They said good night, Harriet calling after him, “Sleep tight.” Opening the screen door, she stepped in, humming “A Bushel and a Peck.”
“Harriet.” Kate tried not to startle her, but that was impossible.
“My, but you gave me a start!” Harriet told her, holding a hand to her heart and advancing into the porch. “Is anything wrong?”
“Bess isn’t home, and I couldn’t sleep, so I came downstairs. I wasn’t spying. I closed my eyes when you pulled up.”
“For crying out loud, you don’t need to explain. Should I make cocoa?”
“No, it’s too warm, thank you. Go to bed. You have work in the morning.”
“I’m not sleepy. I feel like I could stay up all night. I sent DeVore home because he has to get up before the birds.”
“Did you have a good time?”
“Yes. We went to The Quiet Man and then to the Lucky Club for a beer. Hammy Kretzmarsky said that Bess and Donna had been in and left. Bess is probably at Donna’s. Those two can jaw for hours.”
“Yes,” Kate agreed, but she was not reassured. “Did you set the date?”
“Valentine’s Day.”
“Perfect.”
“Did Bess say anything after I left?” Harriet wondered.
“I lay down. We didn’t talk.”
“You shouldn’t fall asleep early in the evening. That’s why you can’t sleep now.”
“Perhaps.”
“DeVore really took to you.”
“You tell him if I was twenty years younger, I’d set my cap for him.”
The daybed springs mewled as Harriet sat down and pulled off her high heels. “I’ve been thinking about Bess.”
“Don’t worry about her. When the time comes to be happy, you can’t put it off. You’re doing the right thing. And you won’t be rid of me, you know.”
“Oh, I know. Where would I get the courage to be a farm wife if I didn’t have you to teach me?”
“Get to bed now. You’ll be exhausted in the morning. And the girls down at work won’t give you a minute’s peace.”
Rising, Harriet gathered up her pumps and purse from the floor, crossed to the rocker, and kissed Kate’s cheek.
Kate had not expected it, and it shook her.
“Don’t wait up for Bess,” Harriet told her. “Heaven only knows when we’ll see her.”
One o’clock. Knives twisted in Kate’s hips. Thank goodness the rocker was easier to get out of than most chairs. You could propel yourself forward with its motion, as she did now, rising to her feet, bent over, holding the arms until she could grab the cane and get it under her.
Straightening, she dragged along into the house. Once she was moving, things got easier. Passing her desk, where a small fluorescent lamp burned, Kate noticed a sheet of paper on the blotter.
Aunt Kate—In case you get up in the night and come downstairs—Gone to meet Donna. I love you and I’m sorry you’re ashamed of me. Too much of Archer in me, I guess. Bess.
Kate stared long at the note, then stuffed it into the pocket of her robe. “Poor little girl,” she whispered, crossing to the wall switch and flicking on the overhead light. “Poor little girl.”
Opening the top drawer of the sideboard, she withdrew a deck of cards and carried them to the dining room table. Seated, she riffled through the deck, extracting the face cards and aces, returning the others to the box. With the face cards and aces she began laying out a pattern of forecasting that Elsie had taught her all those years ago, some cards facedown, others up. Pausing again and again, she held the unused cards against her chin as she studied and considered, then continued.
When the sixteenth and final card was revealed, she made a little “unhh” sound in her throat and sat for some time poring over the people and events lying before her on the table. At last she gathered up the cards, returning them to the box and the box to the drawer.
In the kitchen she set the kettle on to boil and withdrew three small jars from the Hoosier cupboard, each labeled Kate’s. Unscrewing the lids with difficulty, she measured a teaspoon of dried herbs from each jar into a china teapot. When the kettle whistled, she filled the pot with boiling water. While the infusion steeped, she crossed to the open door, staring out toward the back drive and the alley, where the shapes of lilac bushes were a denser black than the rest. Somewhere, Bess was in a car, a dark blue car, with a man Kate did not know.
Too much of Archer in me …
Kate poured a cup of tea, flicked off the kitchen light, and headed toward the darkened living room, setting the cup down on the lamp table. Removing the little blue volume of mythology from the bookcase, she turned on the reading lamp and lowered herself to the sofa, to one side so that she could use the arm to push herself up again. Wetting the tip of her twisted index finger on her tongue, she paged through the book until she found the tale of which she never tired.
“And Demeter braved the Stygian gloom …”
Later, setting the book aside, she turned off the lamp and sat in darkness. “Celia,” she breathed. When she heard the word, she sighed again, “Celia,” as though it were a charm or invocation. For two days Celia’s spirit had beat itself against her like a branch beating itself against a window in a storm.
Kate sipped the tea until it was mostly gone, then set the cup aside, and closed her eyes.
The moon, like a huge china plate, is hanging high in the western sky, lighting her way. She wears a coarse muslin nightgown bleached white as the moon by many washings. On her feet, everyday shoes, thick and sturdy and worn, pick their way through pasture grass, stepping around rocks and cow pies. Following the path trampled by the cows, she holds her hem high to prevent its being dirtied by manure or soaked by the dew lying thick on the grass.
The moon paints the pasture with hoarfrost though the August night is hot and breathless. She has left the stifling bedroom to come looking for air. There is none to be had, but there is space. Space is almost like breeze.
Not only heat and breathlessness were stifling her in the bedroom, but also fear. She can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in life when she has been afraid. But the thought of the man in the gray fedora jellifies her bones.
He isn’t a cattleman, though Martin says he owns cattle; he surely isn’t a farmer despite the farms he’s bought up. He’s a man who owns things, that’s all he is, a man who owns things.
Martin has talked with him. She could not prevent it. But he has promised not to decide anything until the harvest is in. Nevertheless Kate is half mad with fear. She paces the pasture in the dark of night, the grove in the heat of day. Back and forth, back and forth, in ever-shrinking paths, as if walls are being thrown up against her on every side.
She angles around the west side of the pond, then marches along the northern perimeter until she reaches the place where the creek spills out at the eastern end. The cattle come down to the water here, especially in summer, a thin line of willow and cottonwood offering shade. The ground is muck where the cows have slogged in the damp earth.
On the opposite side of the creek, between herself and the house, the grove of cottonwoods rises up, leathery leaves capturing light from the brilliant moon. Mosquitoes are thick and buzzing, but they do not bother Kate.
She stops short. Abruptly, as if summoned, she turns and runs, returning in the direction from which she has come, the moon before her. She rounds the western end of the pond, heads back along the cow trail and into the yard. Out at the road, lights veer into the long lane.
Loping and lunging, slowly they come, two huge and blinding predator eyes. So late. Who would come in the middle of the night? Trouble. Only trouble comes in the middle of the night. The man in the fedora is coming to steal from them when they are most vulnerable and weary.
She sprints headlong, not minding her feet now, but hurtling forward down the lane toward the light. Flinging out her arms to block the way, she cries, “Go back! Back to town! Don’t come here.” She pitches herself at the car’s radiator. The hood ornament strikes her breast and the car hurls her backward.