The next summer when school was out V came home on the Greyhound Bus. Baird picked her up at the highway in the truck. He left her in her room to unpack and went into the kitchen to tell Mary to bring some iced tea out to the front porch, but then, through the kitchen window, he saw V come out on the drive and set off through the orchard toward Denton’s.
He felt sick, knowing she had slipped out the front way to avoid seeing him. He hurried to the porch and called her back, and when she came slowly up the steps he motioned her into a chair. She had changed her clothes. The legs of her levis were rolled up on her ankles. She didn’t speak or even look at him, and hurt and angry, he wondered why.
He said, “Don’t ever go off without telling me, like that.”
She bit her lip. She was sitting in the rocker and she rocked back, bracing the tips of her toes on the floor and looking down at her hands. Mary came out on the porch with two glasses of tea.
“Oh, Mary,” V said, “please could I have some mint in mine?”
Mary nodded. She was huge in a red-and-white-checked Mother Hubbard, and her laceless men’s shoes squeaked softly as she went back into the house.
“How were your grades this time?” Baird asked.
V slumped down in the rocker and hung one leg over the arm. She would not meet his eyes, silently stirring the ice in her glass with a forefinger. When Mary returned with the sprig of mint, she crumpled it and dropped it into her glass, again stirring her finger in the tea and staring down at it. Baird remembered that Cora had always liked mint in her iced tea—and suddenly, in his mind’s eyes, he saw her here. He saw her sitting on the front porch with Mr. Burgess, who had been principal of the Tyler Union Elementary School when she had taught there; he saw Cora and Mr. Burgess sitting on the front porch over iced tea as he and V were sitting now, discussing poetry and books, Mr. Burgess talking in his eastern voice about Shakespeare and Keats and Shelley, with his red mouth like a slash in his long white face, his slender white hands making continual lifting, circling motions; Cora watching him with her head tilted to one side like a bird, her knees and feet held together as she rocked, her dark eyes big and happy with interest. And he saw himself sitting with them, wearing his ignorance and inferiority as Juan wore his dark skin, ashamed to remain with them because he was so completely and irrevocably outside their conversation, restrained from leaving by the suspicion and jealousy that had sickened him.
He shook his head savagely. “V!” he said.
“Yes, Papa?”
“I asked you about your grades. Did you fail Algebra?”
She shook her head without looking up. “D.”
“What else did you get?”
“I got a B in English.” He looked at her steadily and she fidgeted in the chair and finally said, “I got a B in Ancient History, a C in Sacred Studies, and a D in Latin.”
“I didn’t know you were doing so poorly in Latin.”
“I failed the final. We had to conjugate a whole lot of verbs nobody knew and a lot of girls cheated, but I didn’t.” She looked up at him defiantly.
“Take the ice out of your mouth when you talk,” he said. “I’m glad you didn’t cheat but that’s no excuse for getting such a low grade.” He had tried to explain to her that he had spent the money necessary to send her to the Priory instead of to the public high school so that she would have a good education, as her mother had had; so that she might be able to teach school if she ever had to go to work, instead of having to get a job in a packing plant, or becoming a waitress. He watched her spit the ice back into her glass. The rocker squeaked as she leaned forward to place the glass on the floor. She said in a low voice, “I’m sorry I’m such a disappointment to you, Papa.”
“V…” he began, but then he said instead, “You could work harder. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t get better grades if you’d work harder.”
“I do work hard!” He saw that her eyes were wet and hurt. “I guess I’m just stupid,” she said.
“Don’t talk like that, honey. You know you’re not stupid.”
“Well, I guess I am. I guess I’m no good. I don’t like school. Maybe I ought to quit going.”
“You finish school!” he said angrily. “You study harder. There’s no reason why you can’t get better grades.”
She got to her feet and turned away from him. “I’m going over and see Mr. Denton,” she announced.
He looked at her silently, helplessly, as she stood with her back to him, waiting for him to tell her to go, or to send her to her room. He knew he should punish her for this rudeness. But it was her first day home from school and he said, “Don’t be late for supper, honey.” It did not sound the way he had wanted it to, and she walked down the steps without glancing back. He wondered if she were crying.
He sat on the porch for a long time, sipping his iced tea and looking out on the dusty orchard and the rutted dusty road, feeling sorry and helpless and inadequate and, at the same time, angry. He knew she didn’t like the Priory, but he couldn’t let her leave school, and he knew the discipline at the Priory was good for her.
It wasn’t just that the public high school was coeducational; he told himself he was not afraid of that. He wanted her to marry and be happy. But there was a wild bunch at the high school; girls who wore short skirts and tight sweaters and too much lip rouge, riding around in open automobiles with young men who drove too fast, who smoked and probably drank and he didn’t know what else. He had had to run a couple out of his orchard once, youngsters in a convertible coupe who were lolling all over each other. He was pretty sure they had been drinking; when they had driven away the boy had shouted back, calling him an old hick, the girl laughing and leaning against his shoulder and looking back and waving. The youngsters were wild nowadays—it was because of the depression, the paper said—and the Priory was the place for V.
V was late for dinner and he went out on the porch to wait for her. The sun gone behind the coast range, the land was silent and beautiful in the fading day, the alfalfa in the bottom creamy green, streaking and darkening in long finger strips with the warm wind that rustled through the orchard. Tule fog was forming low along the valley floor.
Above the rustling of the trees he heard the sound of hoofs, and then he saw the horse. V was crouched forward on its bare back, her hair streaming out behind her, the copper-colored gelding smoothly running up the slope from the bottom. She pulled to a stop on the drive and, holding the reins in her hand, led the horse up to the porch. The face she raised to Baird was flushed and excited.
“Papa, meet Tony,” she said.
“You’re late for dinner.”
Tony’s small fox ears flicked upright and he stamped a foot. Still smiling, V licked her lips and started to speak, but Baird said, “Supper’s on the table. Now take him home and get back here quick as you can. I don’t want you out after dark.”
“V!” he said. “Did you hear me?”
“Tony’s my horse.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mr. Denton gave him to me.” She was smiling again. “Oh, Papa, isn’t he beautiful?” She pressed her face against Tony’s muzzle, her arm encircling his neck. Baird put his hands on the porch rail and leaned forward, looking down into the horse’s short, dark intelligent face. It was the finest quarter-horse he had ever seen, with heavily muscled hindquarters and a deep chest heaving slightly from the run up the hill.
“You’d better take him back,” he said tiredly.
“Oh, no! He gave him to me!”
“You’d…”
“Oh, please,” V cried softly. “Oh, please, please, Papa!”
“I’ll buy you a horse if I can. We can’t afford anything like that.”
V buried her face in the copper neck. “Oh, please,” she whispered. “He’s so beautiful. I want something to be mine.” Baird didn’t speak, licking the dryness from his lips. Then he heard her whisper, “He’s the only beautiful thing I ever had,” and he almost cried out with pain. He wanted to tell her that he himself had never had anything beautiful; except the land, which was beautiful only at this time of day, and only then if he could forget what it had taken out of him; except Cora, who had died before he had ever known her and of whom he had been jealous and suspicious until the end and even after it; except her, V, who somehow did not belong to him.
But he could not tell her, and he said, “You’d better take him back,” and turned and went inside. Mary was filling the glasses with milk from the dented tin pitcher. She looked up sullenly as he came in. “Put some supper in the oven for her,” he said, and outside he heard the clop of hoofs, slow at first, then hastening, and fading to silence at a gallop.
It was almost an hour before V returned. She went into her room through the kitchen and through her closed door he could hear her crying. He cursed Denton. He couldn’t accept a favor like that, and he couldn’t afford to buy Tony. Finally he went to sit on the porch in the darkness, where he couldn’t hear her crying.
The next morning he was helping Juan clear out one of the irrigation ditches when Denton drove up from the highway in his new Ford pick-up truck. Baird put down his shovel and wiped his mud-caked hands on his trouser legs before they shook hands. Denton was a short, spare man with bushy, iron-gray hair and eyebrows and a long neck. He wore a chamois jacket and tan breeches, and there was a cigarette in a yellow holder between his teeth. Baird had disliked him from the first time they had met, ten years ago now, when Denton had first bought his ranch. He had seen Denton, with one look at Baird’s clothes, ranch buildings and house, decide Baird didn’t amount to much. That first day Denton had talked about his heart trouble, his ranch and the peach orchards near Marysville he had sold to buy it, and about why he had never married. But since he and V had become friends, Denton had dropped his superior manner and seemed strangely anxious that Baird should like him. Baird always had the feeling that Denton had something important to say to him, but could never get around to it.
“Weather’s been fine,” Baird said.
“Hasn’t it? Though I could do with a little less sun.” Denton spoke with a soft, slow, slurring sound, the esses leaking out the corners of his mouth. There was a silence; Baird looked down at Denton’s gleaming riding boots.
“About that horse,” Denton said.
“Yes.”
“I’d like her to have him. I had him broken for the kid, Baird. He’s gentle.”
“It’s not that.”
Denton was silent. He took the holder from his mouth and tapped the cigarette with a yellow-stained forefinger.
“I can’t afford a horse like that,” Baird said. “I wish you’d talked to me first, because…”
“You don’t need to buy him.”
“Well, I couldn’t let you do that.”
“I don’t know why not. Oh, I know how you feel, but… Well, she loves that pony and I’d like to give him to her.”
Baird shook his head. “That horse is worth a lot of money. I can’t let you do me a favor like that.” He shook his head again. But maybe the horse would serve to keep V at home, he thought. He pictured her if he told her he had changed his mind and she could have Tony. He took off his hat and smoothed his hair back.
“I’m not doing you a favor, man,” Denton said. “It’s for her. Why, hell, I’m a lonely old bachelor; it gives me a lift having the kid playing around my place.” He stopped and tapped the cigarette again. They both watched the ashes drift down. “I’d really like to do it for her,” Denton said.
“Well, maybe I could pay you for him after a while. I don’t like to be in debt to anybody.”
“You’re not in debt to me!” Denton protested. “And if you’ll let me I’ll hustle a couple of men over here to put up a corral.”
“No,” Baird said. “Don’t do that. Juan and me…Juan can rig one up.”
He got the tin of Copenhagen from his shirt pocket and bit off a corner of tobacco. “That’s a fine-looking horse,” he said. Looking up, he saw that there were spots of color on Denton’s cheeks, and he was dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief. His mouth was half-open, as though he were going to speak.
But he closed it again and looked away. Finally he nodded and said, “Out of one of my mares by Copper McCloud. The kid’ll take good care of him.”
Baird said awkwardly, “Well, I sure want to thank you. V’ll be happy, I know.”
“She’s a great kid. The best there is. She deserves that pony.”
“I wish I could do more for her,” Baird said, as they walked to the pick-up and shook hands. Denton’s eyes suddenly jerked up to his, almost pleadingly.
“Baird…” he began.
Baird looked at him and after a moment Denton smiled foolishly. His cheeks were red. “I wish you’d let me build that corral,” he said.
“No,” Baird said. “Thanks,” and Denton nodded and got quickly into the pick-up. Baird watched him, puzzled, as Denton backed down the hill. He stood for a moment watching the bend in the road where the pick-up had disappeared, then he walked slowly up to the house to tell V.