The phone booth stood in the bright sun, trapping heat. Rose let her barn jacket slide to the floor and with bemusement studied the mud-encrusted overalls and the frayed sweatshirt under-neath. Who had she been when she’d put on those clothes? It was as if someone else had dressed her. She lifted and let fall each foot, clunking the heavy-soled secondhand Red Wings, breathed in her own sweat smell, and ran a hand through her stubbly hair, picturing herself in a photo: The Composer in Her Brief Farm Phase.
She’d driven off without her wallet or address book, but knew the numbers by heart and would call collect. Bells would ring at her command in Alan’s rooms in St. Paul and Ursula’s in Philadelphia, and from those rooms life surely opened outward. Who could say but she’d have a concert in Philadelphia one day soon?
Soaking in the heat inside the booth, she gazed out at the squat brick and shingle storefronts of the one-block main street of Cosmos, and the towering conveyors of the grain elevator, and the prairie beyond, vast and lost. She could love the prairie and not have to live in it. To the rhythm of a distantly ringing phone, music tumbled inside her. Ursula would shout and Alan would ask a jillion questions. But neither was home.
She thought of Emma Williams. She and Emma had taken to sitting side by side at Quaker Meeting, and one Sunday, invited on the spur of the moment, she’d followed Emma out on the highway from Litchfield halfway to Hutchinson. They’d turned onto a gravel road at a sign in the shape of a winged corncob—she thought she could find it again—and turned again at a round barn and the next place was Emma’s.
Emma’s farmhouse sprawled in a grove of oaks above a pond. The house only seemed in poor repair: she primed and painted one side of it a summer, so it stood in various shades of blue-gray, various stages of fading and cracking. The inside walls had turned brown under years of wood smoke and the furniture was a worn hodgepodge, but the place was full of books and pictures and there was a lamp to turn on at every spot a lamp could be wanted.
On a rise above the pond, two upholstered armchairs, which had been surrendered to the sun and rain, creaked and sent up puffs of dust when the two of them sat down there. Mother of several grown children, grand-mother of many more, Emma was now on her own—no one but herself and the weather—and loved it. A husband had drunk himself out of the picture long ago, she told Rose with a dismissive wave of her hand, and she’d gone to work for the county—no choice, mouths to feed—while studying law at night.
“Law,” said Rose. “Wow.”
Had Emma always looked the part, Justice with Her Scales, or had she grown into it, Rose wondered? Was there something in Rose that would develop so that, years in the future, younger people might say to them-selves that hers was the face of music?
Emma had passed the bar and become a public defender, but no bleeding heart.
“A public defender,” said Rose. “Wow.”
“Wow,” Emma had echoed and had tilted her head back and raised her eyebrows and grinned, no longer ancient but a kid again. In that look, Rose had recognized the offer of friendship but had been too snarled up inside just then to do more than sit silent, and so had gone away without telling Emma a thing about herself.
My friend, Rose allowed herself to say as she turned at the flying corncob.
A dizzy little rhythm in her head changed into something that loped along. She’d never mentioned Emma at the Goat Pasture. This was mis-guided loyalty, she realized, fear that the others would think she was making friends elsewhere, moving on. How had she gotten herself into such a state, inhibited, mistrustful of herself and other people, unable to take the open hand of friendship? Oh, she was moving on.
Emma’s truck was missing, but affixed to the door was a dog-eared note, much punctured by tack pricks: Back soon—Come in.
Rose sat on the steps and took her letter out. She read it closely and then stood up, her heart pounding, and went in and spread the three pages of it on Emma’s table. Here in fine print was her project description in her own words: a concert of her music featuring the cello soloist Lila Goldensohn. She hadn’t remembered proposing that.
“Why, Rose,” Emma called through the screen door and burst in, dumping a chain saw. Embracing Rose swiftly, she spotted the letter. “Why, you clever thing,” she said, scanning it. “You’re a composer! Is this the biggest thrill in maybe a hundred years? And you never breathed a word.”
Rose laughed and blushed. She’d been right to come to Emma.
“I’m going to buy fifteen tickets,” declared Emma. “You sit down here and tell me all about yourself, starting at the beginning.”
Self-consciously, Rose sketched in the peculiar parents and the wild sister and then added a piano, warming to her story of Musician as Lonely Young Girl. But as she approached the present, dread crept in. She was going to have to bring Lila into it.
“My god, Lila Goldensohn! Rumor has it she lives around here, though nobody’s ever seen her. Do you mean to say you know her?”
She admitted she lived on Lila’s farm, at least at present.
Emma was astonished. “No, really? What’s she like?”
Rose didn’t want to say.
“Ah. Shy? I’ve read she’s a hermit nowadays.”
It was a startling thought. Did Lila ever leave the farm? Rose couldn’t think of a time when she had. Except for the defunct Studebaker, dusty and cobwebbed in the barn, Lila had no car. Could she drive, even? Did it matter? Lila kept to her land and the rest of them, Rose included, mostly did the same. Perhaps Lila had sworn off the world for good and would refuse to play Rose’s concert, and that would be that. And that would be best. Could she still cut Lila from her grant proposal? Alan would know.
She said goodbye to Emma, drove back to the farm, told her news, and suffered everyone’s congratulations. They seemed genuinely happy for her—jubilant, even—all but Natalie, who kept to the background with a fixed smile. Even Peggy threw her arms around Rose; Dinah pounded her on the back; and Lila, electrified, tripped over Josie as she thumped upstairs to get her cello.
Rose wanted to call to her to wait, to have caution. Rose was the one who’d started it with Lila, rushing backstage, bursting into tears, begging to write music for her. But she’d tried on Lila’s life and it hadn’t fit. It was an episode and it was over.
Throughout that evening and into the night, well past bedtime, Lila could be heard at her cello up in her room, playing Rose’s music. At a late hour, the music halted and angry voices erupted. Out in the barn, Rose got up and looked down on the house to see Natalie’s light on. The voices died out, the light switched off and, as Rose bundled herself back into her hammock, the cello resumed. Lila did, indeed, expect to play Rose’s con-cert and so was about to have her feelings hurt. Again. As soon as Rose could manage to pack herself and Natalie up, she was out of there.
Or so she thought.
The first obstacle was Natalie, who refused to leave the farm. She was settled there, she told Rose. She would not go to the city. It would be bad for the baby.
Rose couldn’t fathom this. Didn’t Natalie complain about the farm all the time? Didn’t she hate everybody? And, Rose ruthlessly pointed out, didn’t everybody hate her?
Oh, well, Rose could say whatever mean things came into her head; she could strut around in her concert grant britches—Natalie wasn’t budging. Rose could leave her there; Natalie wouldn’t stop her. Why didn’t Rose just do that?
Well, Rose couldn’t. Other people were involved.
Her second obstacle was the grant proposal, what she’d laid out in her own words. She wasn’t sure how to get out of it.
As she backed out of the driveway on her way to Alan in the city, Rose saw Lila striding to the barn, rocking chair hoisted overhead, with Natalie in shouting pursuit. Under Natalie’s weight, one of the runners had come loose. Rose couldn’t just leave Natalie at the farm.
Now she sat at Alan’s table, eating the enormous chicken sandwich he’d made for her and moaning as he told her, gently but firmly, that Lila could not be cut from her program. He’d worked his Composer’s Guild sources, and word was that Rose’s great coup had been to engage Lila to perform again, that Lila’s letter of recommendation had virtually assured the grant.
“Well, then, I’ll just hand the money over to Lila,” said Rose, sinking into gloom.
“It’s no reflection on you. This is politics. It’s marketing. It’s publicity.” His phone was ringing, but he ignored it. “Be strategic, Rose. Use your luck.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” she told him. “Lila and me.”
His face darkened.
“I know you warned me.”
“Yeah, well, I’m guilty of my own experiments, as we know.” He knelt beside her chair and put his arms around her, his eyes so unbearably sad that she had to look away across his shoulder. Friendship, mutual solace, whatever it was, she needed him. She needed him to know every agonized detail of what had and had not occurred between her and Lila. That monstrous night, half enacted, half smothered, still clung. She couldn’t see how she’d ever arrive at comfort with Lila the way she and Alan had, able now to put consoling arms around each other. She couldn’t imagine Lila looking at her any way other than with that dead look, the look of someone who’s hopeless but keeps going through the motions, a look she could expect to see the night of her Composer’s Guild concert, the con-cert that Lila was apparently destined to play.
Alan’s phone rang again. “Some student. Some godforsaken committee member. At ten rings, they’ll quit.” At twenty rings, he picked up and handed the receiver to Rose.
“Well, here I am,” said Ursula.
“Ursula! Oh, god, Ursula, I need you,” said Rose, not hiding her tears.
“I’m at the frigging Goat Patch, if you want to know.”
“Where?”
“Where are you? I’ve only got till tomorrow.”
“On my way.”
It dawned on Rose as she drove back out of the city that the hard freeze had come overnight and ended the growing season. The grass had gone papery. Leaves fell in clumps, and whatever remained in vegetable and flower beds was wilted or blackened as though a malevolent hand had passed over.
It was night by the time she reached the Goat Pasture. There were people in the gazebo—Lila, layered in sweaters, playing while Josie held a lantern and turned pages—and Guy’s truck was parked at the barn, beside Ursula’s glossy rental car.
On the front step, Rose glanced in through the window and stopped at the sight of Guy, bent over the wood stove, apparently alone. As he fed a log in, the fire lit his hands and his shirt front and his open collar where his chest disappeared into mossy shadow. In the fire’s glow, his lidded eyes were lively above the stillness of his bones. How long had it been since she’d really looked at him? She wanted to take his face in her hands. However painfully, she was coming alive again. Old hungers were surfacing: hunger for a place in the world, for friendship and for every other possibility. Why not love? Maybe her long penance was over for her sin against Lila, for the earlier trouble she’d gotten into with Alan, and for the misfortune of her pregnancy and how it had undone them, herself and Guy, so near to the beginning of their love.
She stepped inside.
Strangely, a bed sheet was tacked up over the kitchen doorway and, behind it, a light cast huge shadows. A humped form lay on the table and someone stood alongside, poking at it and murmuring. Guy straightened up and put his finger to his lips.
“Ursula?” she called.
“In a minute,” said Ursula from the behind the sheet. Guy led her outside.
“What is it? Is the baby coming?”
“No. It’s an examination. Prenatal care.”
They stood awkwardly in the evening chill. She reached for him but he held her back. “Your grant. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“How could I? You don’t have a phone.”
Across the meadow, Lila’s cello ceased, and in the house, Natalie started to cry. Rose felt her heart contract at the sound, though it was nothing more than what she’d imagined hidden beneath Natalie’s laughter all along—the sound of lonely misery.
“I was about to write you,” she told Guy, tensely. “Please, I just heard about the grant myself, only the day before yesterday.”
Lila and Josie approached across the meadow as Ursula stepped out-side. Natalie, swiping at tears, peeped out through the open door.
“You’re letting heat out,” called Lila.
“I am not delivering your baby,” Ursula told Natalie. “I’ve got to go back first thing tomorrow. Which is when you go out and get yourself a doctor. Agreed?”
Natalie looked from Ursula to Rose to Guy. “All I want,” she sniffled, “is to sit in a stupid rocking chair.”
“It’s being reglued,” Lila said and pushed past them into the house. “In or out?”
Natalie took a step backward and Lila closed the door.
“The baby seems fine,” Ursula said. “God looks after fools. She’s fortunate.”
Natalie opened the door again and peeped out. Her belly swelled toward them. “I can’t come out in the cold,” she said bleakly. “That would be bad for the baby.”
There was the immediate question of where people would sleep that night.
“Emma,” Rose told Ursula. “A woman I know nearby, a friend. You and I will go to Emma’s.”
“You’re just going to leave me here?” quavered Natalie.
“I thought here was where you wished to be,” said Rose.
Natalie sighed and closed the door, and Guy turned to Ursula. “I don’t see how you can call her fortunate.”
“That’s because you’re a sucker,” Ursula retorted.
“And you’re fucking rude.” He turned on his heel and walked away, and Rose noticed anew the length of his stride and his grace. She was indeed coming alive again.
“He’s going to sleep in the barn,” she told Ursula.
“Well, you better get Natalie out of here before someone wrings her neck for her. That would be bad for the baby.” Ursula barked out a laugh. “So this is paradise.”
“Yah, well,” said Rose, “post-snake.”
“Paradise, either way.” Ursula took a step out into the yard and spun under the prickling stars. “I ought to move out here.”
“To the Goat Pasture?”
“God, no. But to someplace quiet. To wherever you are, Rose.”
“You have to go tomorrow morning? This isn’t a visit, Ursula. It’s a hit-and-run.”
Ursula sighed. In the nearly twelve months since their previous visit, her hair had grown out. Rose was the one with the haircut now. Ursula’s good, thick, healthy hair fell, chestnut-brown, again to her shoulders, but her face still seemed tired. They wrapped their arms around each other and Rose dodged the thought that her only true friends were people she almost never saw.
There was Emma, however. She was making friends with Emma.
They climbed into the rental car, she and Ursula, and rolled down the windows and screamed into the chill all the way to Emma’s. Ursula hollered to the fence posts and the withered fields and the sky that Rose had won a concert grant and was on her way to greatness. Beside Ursula, her worry over Lila dwindled and her anguish over Natalie drained away. Rose didn’t need to confide in Ursula so much as to roar alongside her.
They began to spin the tale of the Pregnant Maiden of the Goat Pasture. Arriving at Emma’s, they repeated it all for her—Rose mimicked the mischief and Ursula the pathos. Though amused by their monkeyshines, Emma grasped the difficulties and proposed to take Rose and Natalie in for a time. Natalie would not have to face the city. Rose could drive over to rehearse with Lila—Emma sensed discomfort there—and then drive home to Emma’s.
“Do it,” said Ursula.
Rose was staggered by the offer. “But you live alone,” she said. “What about your privacy?”
Emma’s answer came bold and merry. “I’m no bleeding heart—don’t worry. It’s a big house and from time to time I enjoy taking in strays.”
“But you haven’t met Natalie.”
“The Pregnant Maiden? Can’t wait.” Emma shot Rose her wide-eyed grin.
The next morning, Ursula went and in the evening, they packed up to move—Rose and Natalie with Guy, who stayed over to help, though there wasn’t much to carry: a box of clothes and books, a file cabinet of manuscript pages, Natalie’s knitting bag, the pine cradle, and Rose’s cello.
Good-byes at the Goat Pasture were muted. Rose would be back within the week to plan her concert with Lila. Only Wilma and Noah bundled up to wave them off, just as they’d come out in greeting upon Rose’s first arrival. She recalled her first view of the house, with its many windows that had seemed to examine her from every angle. Now, in the dark, the shades were drawn, the eyes closed. Then the short caravan, Rose’s station wagon and Guy’s truck, rounded a bend and the house dis-appeared from sight.
Emma shook hands gravely all around and sat Natalie down to discuss the birth. A doctor was mentioned, and a hospital nearby.
“Emma understands,” Natalie whispered to Rose with reproachful good cheer, though Rose wasn’t fooled. Whatever Natalie might say, she’d been taken in hand.
Emma settled Natalie in a little room at the top of the stairs, right next to a bathroom so she wouldn’t have far to go. Guy was given sheets and blankets for the front-room sofa, and Rose was directed to the bedroom beside the kitchen, below the stairs.
Warmed by the proximity of the kitchen’s wood stove, her memories of the hammock in the frigid barn hurtled into the past. Wide awake, clean from a bath, at ease, almost happy, she sat up in bed. Guy was no more than a few feet away. She wanted to go to him. And why not? A burning log collapsed in the stove. Under the sound, Rose crept to the door. The knob, turning back, gave only a slight crackle, but as she slid over the threshold, the floorboards groaned. He was only past the staircase and around the corner, but it wouldn’t do to wake Emma. She paused and sat down where the moon cast shadows of oak branches on the bottom stair.
Creaking footsteps, not her own, approached. She heard a whispered exclamation and slow, muffled progress. It had to be Guy. He’d had the same thought and was coming to her. Giddy, she stifled a laugh and moved up the stairs out of the moonlight where she couldn’t be seen. His shape loomed below her. She watched for him to reach for her doorknob and to find the door open. But, instead, he turned and started up the stairs and, before she knew it, was tripping over her, gasping and grab-bing the railing.
“Guy,” she whispered, shocked, shoving down what was welling up inside her, unready to know what she now knew. “Guy, where are you going?”