Her faded forget-me-not-print dress lay in a crumpled heap, and her stockings—the toe of which she’d crookedly mended with ugly black thread—snaked across one of her shoes, which had fallen on its side. Where was her other shoe? Jack Lily was asleep beside her. She was tired, but her body thrummed. A bristly wolf spider skittered into the debris-filled corner of the room. It was a female as big as her palm, a white egg sac on its back.
By the door was a basket of eggs Annie had brought to deliver to the Jensens. She had been gone an hour or so. She ran through the list again. Samuel had gone in with a load of grain. Birdie was driving the combine in the far glade. Fred was cleaning out the coop. It would take fifteen minutes to walk from here to the Jensen place. She might make it back even before Samuel returned. But she couldn’t make herself get up just yet. Just one more minute. The musky smell of him. The warm wind on her bare skin. She was only ever naked to bathe, but she had no urge to cover herself now. He had brought a quilt again for the mattress, but it was on the floor where he’d dropped it, gathering her to him as soon as they had crossed the threshold.
She hadn’t thought that much about sex after she and Samuel had settled into their marriage. There had been moments of passion, certainly in those early days—finally they could be together in that way—but she relegated her needs to a shelf just out of reach, as she thought she should, as women did. And it wasn’t as if she could talk about it with Samuel, couldn’t even imagine talking about it. Eventually she saw sex as part of being a wife. It was enjoyable enough sometimes, made her feel closer to him, but she didn’t feel she was missing out. After the children, she did not long for affection, and she often wished she could go to sleep when she felt his body hug hers, his needy hands seeking her out. The only other man she’d kissed had been William Thurgood, and when he’d pushed his wriggling tongue into her mouth she’d thought she might gag.
Now she was afraid she would think of nothing but sex for the rest of her life. What a crazy thing to have a new body with hers. Jack was taller, fuller, sure of himself as he unbuttoned her dress and slid it off her arms to the floor. But it was his undisguised hunger that fed her own, his confident hands and eager mouth that had made her feel warm and slithery. Wanting was dangerous.
Get up, Annie, she said to herself. She raised herself up on her elbow and put her hand on his chest, feeling it rise and fall in a quiet rhythm. He did not wake. She shook out her undergarments and got dressed, shoving the stockings in her pocket. The other shoe she found under his pants, which she folded into a neat square.
It was only outside in the sun and heat that she began to feel the weight of what she had done. Her feet were terribly hot and slipping in her shoes, and the sand worked its way in. With each step she fell more into herself, and her stomach roiled with the curdled truth of her betrayal. I can see you, she imagined God saying. The basket of eggs hit her hip and one shell cracked, freeing yolk and white into a slippery mess, which dripped through the wicker and landed in thick shiny drops on her skirt.
* * *
AFTER JACK HAD told Styron about the boat, word was all over town in a matter of days. Did you hear? Samuel Bell is building an ark. It made people laugh, but it also made them uneasy and then angry. How dare Bell think he’d been chosen?
Styron loved it. He was positively gleeful. An ark! In Mulehead, no less. He couldn’t have dreamed up a better idea on his own. When Jack returned to the office, he found Styron sketching billboards on the back of an envelope.
“I probably shouldn’t have told you,” Jack said.
“Everyone knows anyway. I overheard the fogies yammering about it last night at Ruth’s. It’s going to put us on the map.”
“We’re already on the map.” Jack pointed to the Cimarron County map tacked to the wall.
“What do you think?” Styron slid one of his sketches in front of him.
“Easy there, Styron.”
“You think we should wait until it’s finished before advertising it?”
“I think you’re getting ahead of yourself.”
Jack stood at the window and watched the gaunt McCleary brothers crouched on their haunches, chewing tobacco and spitting into a can shared between them. He fidgeted with the piles of papers at his desk. With his thumbnail he scraped at a smudge of dried glue on the filing cabinet.
“You okay, boss? You look a little flushed.”
“I’m fine. Feel pretty good, actually.”
Styron glanced up, wondering, not for the first time, if Jack had a woman. He ran through the short list of available ladies in town, but couldn’t settle on any likely candidates. There was a rumored woman for hire over in Beauville who worked in the hat shop or a candy store—he’d heard different accounts—but the mayor seemed a little too straight for a working girl.
“I have to go to Chicago,” Jack said. “Probably leave in a couple weeks.”
“Chicago?”
“My father’s not doing so well.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Styron said, already clicking ahead to when he would be left in charge. He could bring Hattie to town to see his office. She always told Styron that he should be the mayor, that he would be mayor, that he was meant for great things. They had lain on his couch together and he had pressed himself against her stockinged thigh and she had run her fingers through his hair, before he excused himself to the bathroom, quickly turning away to shield from view his tented trousers, while Hattie took out her latest issue of Ladies’ World and returned to a dog-eared recipe for hush puppies, which she thought sounded quaintly Southern and gosh-darn delicious, and wouldn’t he like her to make them for him next Saturday night?
“I don’t know for how long,” Jack said.
Without Annie, as short a time as possible, he thought. He felt buttressed by their afternoon together. The smell of her neck, the curve of her hip. She had been waiting at the door for him and fell into his arms without even a hello. Afterward they had not talked much—he felt a little sheepish at having fallen asleep so quickly—and then she had left. But it didn’t worry him, not with the wildness of their bodies coming together like that. He’d planned to tell her about Chicago, but, as soon as he saw her, he forgot everything. They’d barely gotten upstairs before he had slipped her dress off her shoulders.
“Maybe the ark’ll be finished by the time you come back.”
Jack peered over at Styron’s drawings.
“Something tells me you’ll be keeping pretty close tabs on Bell’s progress.”
Jack felt a small ding of guilt about not going home immediately. He could barely admit to himself that he hoped his father would die before he arrived so he could remember him as he was, not as an old, sad man caged in a wasted body.
“Hey, you never told me if anything came of the dinosaur meeting,” Styron said.
“They think there might be bones out there near the mesa. A hundred and fifty million years old.”
“A hundred and fifty million years?”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t begin to get the science of it.”
“That’s million, with an ‘m’?”
“That’s what I said, Styron. I’m not sure how well it’ll sit with folks trying to keep their fields from blowing away to know some eggheads from Oklahoma City are after prehistoric bones.”
“They really think they’re going to dig up a dinosaur in Cimarron County?”
“They really do.”
“Things are looking up around here,” Styron said.
* * *
IT WAS SUPPER, day three of harvest, and Samuel could barely lift his fork, having worked through the day and most of the night before. He would go back out to finish the last load before nightfall. In the flush years, they’d hired men and the neighbors helped and afterward they all feasted together, but this year it was just the four of them. Fred was already through a drumstick of fried chicken, his mask hanging loose around his neck. Birdie picked at a wing. They had moved the table outside into the shade of the locust trees, as was tradition. The fans of leaflets sent polka-dotted shadows across the bounty.
“It’s wonderful,” Samuel said.
“You haven’t even taken a bite,” Annie said.
“It’s still wonderful,” he said. “We’re blessed.”
“Can you tell how much is coming in? What do you guess on yield?”
“Five. Five and a half.” It was meager, but it was something.
Despite his weary body, Samuel was feeling recharged. For hours he’d swung the tractor through the rutted dry rows, the combine devouring the wheat; the rumble of the machine and the rush of grain spitting into the tank blocked out all sounds of the natural world. In his head he saw in vivid relief how the boat should be. A three-chined hull. Humble but elegant. He had prayed on it, and returned again and again to an image of the four of them on the boat.
“People are talking,” Birdie said, pushing her peas into a little pile. “Isn’t that right, Freddie?”
Samuel looked up from his plate and Fred nodded, his pale face dappled in shade. Annie wiped the blue-checked napkin across her mouth, about to chastise Birdie, but then stopped herself.
“And what are they talking about?” he asked.
Birdie cocked her head, her eyes insouciant. “What do you think they’re talking about?”
“Birdie,” Annie said sharply.
“No, it’s okay. Let’s get it out there. The boat, right? What are they saying?”
“I’ve been stuck here, remember? Ask Fred,” Birdie said.
His daughter’s edge was flinty, unnerving. His sweet girl! Samuel swallowed a bite of mashed potatoes but it moved down his throat too slowly, a warm and pasty lump. He turned to Fred, who scribbled something on his notepad and slid it across the table: “Where you going to get 2 elephants?”
“Do you laugh when they say things like that? It’s okay to laugh,” Samuel said. “It’s good to laugh.”
Fred smiled a little, but shook his head.
“They’re making fun of him,” Birdie said.
Annie wasn’t jumping in, Samuel noticed. She was letting him fend for himself. He set down his fork and sipped more water. A fly landed on his buttered bread.
“Forget it, Freddie,” Birdie said, softening her tone. “They’re just being dumb kids.”
“More chicken, Samuel?” Annie asked.
He looked down at his full plate. “I’m okay, thanks.”
“Pull your mask up as soon as you’re finished,” she said to Fred. “The doctor said.” She rearranged the serving platters, her hands jumping around the table like crickets.
Samuel wanted to place his hands on hers to still them. She seemed restless and bothered. Earlier in the day she’d dropped a serving platter, porcelain shards all over the floor. Her eyes darted away from his when he tried to meet her gaze. He could see that the boat was weighing on her, but he was doing this thing. The boat was under way and he could not turn back. He just wished he knew how to make her see, make her believe in what he saw.
“What did the mayor want?” Birdie asked.
“The mayor?” Samuel asked.
“Saw his car coming this way yesterday.”
Annie quieted her hands, palms flat on the tablecloth.
Fred looked at his supper. He should have kept it to himself. He would keep everything to himself from now on. No trouble, no trouble, no trouble.
“I forgot to mention it. You collapsed so soundly when you came in,” Annie said.
“What’d he want?”
She breathed through her mouth, concentrated on the crooked lines of kernels on her corncob. He doesn’t know anything, she thought, he doesn’t know anything at all.
“He has an idea. For wood. Or Styron does. Something about boxcars.”
“Boxcars?”
“A mess of them at the old yard.”
“That’s good news. That’s real good news.” He smiled, and she braced herself for the three words that she knew would follow. “The Lord provides,” he said.
She felt like upending the whole table, running until her lungs burned and her insides retched. With little wind, flies landed on the relish, the chicken, the rhubarb cobbler.
“Funny he came all the way out here. Could have called. Not that I don’t appreciate it.”
Fred studied his father’s face. Yes, it was strange, Pop, he thought.
Birdie rubbed her shoes against the dirt, the small stones pressing into her feet through the thin soles. Her arms ached from helping her father with the grain bins, but she was secretly glad for the hard, silent work. When did you tell your parents you were pregnant? When did you come clean about lying with a boy before marriage, a boy who ran off, leaving you with a baby, which left you no choice but to stay here forever?
Samuel sighed and rested his chin on his hand as he chewed. He eyed the level of the sun and sipped his milk.
“I best get back out there,” he said, sinking some even as he said it. “If I’m going to do thirty today.”
“You barely ate,” Annie said. “Won’t do you much good to collapse while threshing.”
“Get through it every year. I’ll do it again.”
He winked at Annie whose mouth lifted only ever so slightly in return. Birdie knew her mother was angry about the boat, but she would never admit it. Fred flung a pea at her with his spoon. It landed in her hair. She slid it out with two fingers and whipped it back at him.
“Children,” Annie scolded.
“He started it,” Birdie said.
“Birdie, please,” Samuel said.
“Barbara Ann, I do believe you will be sixteen next week. Let’s try to act our age.”
“Okay,” she said, sighing, tired of being so mad, suddenly seeing her parents’ disappointed faces when they found out she was pregnant. She would be due in the spring. Baggy clothes and a big coat through the winter—maybe she would be one of those girls who didn’t show much—and a trip to the hospital in Beauville where she would give the baby away? Surely there were families wanting babies. She’d have to ask Mary Stem to drive her, think of a lie to tell her parents. By the time Mary told someone else, despite promising on her life not to tell anyone, Birdie would have given birth, the baby whisked away by some happy family, and she would be herself again, free to say goodbye to Mulehead, go all the way to the ocean. It was a child’s fantasy. She couldn’t even play it out in her head without feeling sunk.
“Don’t wait up,” Samuel said.
“Good luck,” Fred wrote. He smiled, his mask on his chin.
“Grain tank’s near full,” he said.
“I’ll be ready,” Birdie said.
“Ann?” Annie shifted her gaze from the horizon to Samuel. “Thank you.”
“I’ll wrap some chicken for you,” she said, knocking over her chair as she stood. “And a bottle of milk.” She rushed off to the house without righting the chair.
The three remaining Bells looked at the chair for a spell until Fred hopped up and set it straight. A wet cough racked his body.
“Get your mask on, son.”
Fred pushed the mask over his mouth and nose, slumping back in his chair.
“When the grain’s in you’ll help me with the boat?”
Fred nodded, placated. Birdie retreated to the kitchen, her shoulders rounded under the weight of the dishes. The thin wispy clouds had bulked up.
“I don’t have timber enough for the frame, but we can start cutting the ribs soon. Need forty or so.”
Fred flipped to a blank page of his pad and wrote, “I will measure.”
Samuel was about to protest. Fred’s skin was sallow, and ashy half-moons shadowed his eyes above his mask, a reminder that he was still not well.
“As long as the animals are tended to. And your mama doesn’t need help with anything.”
Fred clapped once and scurried inside, leaving Samuel alone at the table. He picked up a green bean with his fingers and dipped it in the pool of butter at the bottom of the serving bowl before folding the whole thing into his mouth. A large cloud had darkened, and he watched it inch its way across the sun. It sat high overhead. Instead of the black or brown of a duster it had a deep blue cast.
Annie came out with a metal lunch pail in one hand and a thermos in the other. In the flat light she was an apparition. A beautiful ghost. He stood to meet her.
“We should talk,” he said.
She stood still, and the breeze picked up and blew her hair across her face. She made no move to brush it away. He took the pail and thermos.
“Tonight, maybe,” he said.
She didn’t answer, just looked at him with those honey eyes.
“Ann? Annie?”
She blinked and looked up at the sky and then he felt it too. On his hand. Then again on his head.
Rain.