“Is that Glendon?”
“Yes.”
He crossed to the bureau, picked up the framed photo and held it, surprised at the man’s age and lack of physical attractiveness. A rather beaked nose and a bony, hollow-eyed face with narrow lips. “He was some older than you.”
“Five years.”
Will studied the picture in silence, thinking the man looked much older.
“He wasn’t much of a looker. But he was a good man.”
“I’m sure he was.” A good man. Unlike himself, who had broken the laws of both God and man. Could a woman forget such transgressions? Will set the picture down.
Eleanor asked, “Would it bother you if I left the picture there—so the boys don’t forget him?”
“No, not at all.” Was it a reminder that Glendon Dinsmore still held a special place in her heart? That though Will Parker might share her sheets tonight, he had no right to expect to share anything else—ever? He faced the wall while pulling his shirttails out, wanting to impose nothing upon her, not even glimpses of his bare skin.
She watched him unbutton his shirt, shrug it off, hang it on the closet doorknob. Her fascination came as a surprise. There were moles on his back, and firm, tan skin. He was tapered as a turnip from shoulder to waist, and his arms had filled out considerably in the two months he’d been here. Though she felt like a window-peeper, she continued gaping. He unbuckled his belt and her eyes dropped to his hips—thin, probably even bony inside his jeans. When he sat down the mattress sagged, sending her heart aflutter—even so slight a sharing of the bed felt intimate, after having it to herself for over half a year. He hoisted a foot, removed a cowboy boot and set it aside, followed by its mate. Standing, he dropped his jeans to the floor, then stretched into bed with one fluid motion, giving no more than a flash of thighs textured with dark hair and an old pair of Glendon’s shorts before the quilt covered him and he stretched out beside her with his arms behind his head.
They stared at the ceiling, lying like matched bookends, making sure not so much as the hair on their arms brushed, listening to the tick of the clock, which seemed to report like rifle shots.
“You can turn down the lantern some. It doesn’t need to be that bright.”
He rolled and reached, tugging the bedclothes. “How’s that?” He peered back over his outstretched arm while the light dimmed to pale umber, enhancing the shadows.
“Fine.”
Again he stretched flat. The silence beat about their ears. Neither of them risked any of the settling motions usually accompanying the first minutes in bed. Instead they lay with hands folded primly over quilts, trying to adjust to the idea of sharing a sleeping space, dredging up subjects of conversation, discarding them, tensing instead of relaxing.
Presently, he chuckled.
“What?” She peeked at him askance. When his face turned her way she fastened her gaze on the ceiling.
“This is weird.”
“I know.”
“We gonna lay in this bed every night and pretend the other one isn’t there?”
She blew out a long breath and let her eyes shift over to him. He was right. It was a relief, simply acknowledging that there was another person in the bed. “I wasn’t looking forward to this. I thought it’d be awkward, you know?”
“It was. It is,” he admitted for both of them.
“I been jumpy as a flea since suppertime.”
“Since morning, you mean. Hardest thing I ever did was to open that door and walk into the kitchen this morning.”
“You mean you were nervous, too?”
“Didn’t it show?”
“Some, but I thought I was worse that way than you.”
They mulled silently for some time before Will remarked, “A pretty strange wedding day, huh?”
“Well, I guess that was to be expected.”
“Sorry about the judge and the kiss—you know.”
“It wasn’t so bad. We lived through it, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, we lived through it.” He crossed his hands behind his head and contemplated the ceiling, presenting her with a hairy armpit that smelled of Ivory soap.
“I’m sorry about the lantern. It’ll keep you awake, won’t it?”
“Maybe for a while, but it doesn’t matter. If you hadn’t slept in a real bed for as long as me, you wouldn’t complain about a lantern either.” He lowered one hand and ran it across the coarse, clean sheet which smelled of lye soap and fresh air. “This is a real treat, you know. Real sheets. Pillow cases. Everything.”
No reply entered Eleanor’s mind, so she lay in silence, adjusting to the feeling of his nearness and scent. Outside a whippoorwill sang and from the boys’ room came the sound of the crib rattling as Thomas turned over.
“Eleanor?”
“Hm?”
“Could I ask you something?”
“Course.”
“You afraid of the dark?”
She took her time answering. “Not afraid exactly... well, I don’t know. Maybe.” She thought a moment. “Yeah, maybe. I been sleepin’ with the lantern on so long I don’t know anymore.”
Will turned his head to study her profile. “Why?”
Her eyes met his, and she thought about her fanatic grandparents, her mother, all those years behind the green shades. But to talk about it would make her seem eccentric in his eyes, and she didn’t want to be. Neither did she want to ruin her wedding day with painful memories. “Does it matter?”
He studied her green eyes minutely, wishing she’d confide in him, tell him the facts behind Lula’s gossip. But whatever secrets she held, he wouldn’t hear them tonight. “Then tell me about Glendon.”
“Glendon? You want to talk about him... tonight?”
“If you do.”
She considered for some time before asking, “What do you want to know?”
“Anything you want to tell. Where did you meet him?”
Studying the dim circle of light on the ceiling, she launched into her recollection. “Glendon delivered ice to our house when I was a little girl. We lived in town then, my mother and my grandparents and me. Grandpa was a preacher man, used to go out on circuit for weeks at a time.” She peered at Will from the corner of her eye, gave a quirk of a smile. “Fire and brimstone, you know. Voice like a cyclone throwing dirt against the house.” She told him what she chose, winnowing out any hints of her painfully lonely youth, the truth about her family, the bad memories from school. Of Glendon she spoke more frankly, telling about their meetings in the woods when she was still a girl, and of their shared respect for wild creatures. “The first present he ever brought me was a sack of corn for the birds, and from then on we were friends. I married him when I was nineteen and I been livin’ here ever since,” she finished.
At the end of her recital, Will felt disappointed. He’d learned nothing of the house in town nor why she had been locked in it, none of the secrets of Eleanor Dinsmore Parker. The truth seemed strange: she was his wife, yet he knew less about her than he knew of some of the whores he’d frequented in his day. Above all, he wanted to know about that house so that he could assure her it made no difference to him. Given time, she might tell him more, but for now he respected her right to privacy. He, too, had secret hurts too painful to reveal yet.
“Now your turn,” she said.
“My turn?”
“Tell me about you. Where you lived when you were a boy, how you ended up here.”
He began with sterile facts. “I lived mostly in Texas but there were so many towns I couldn’t name ‘em all. Sometimes in orphanages, sometimes people would take me in. I was born down around Austin, they tell me, but I don’t remember it till I grew up and went back there one time when I was doing some rodeoing.”
“What do you remember?”
“First memories, you mean?”
“Yes.”
Will thought carefully. It came back slowly, painfully. “Spilling a bowl of food, breakfast cereal, I think, and
getting whupped so hard I forgot about being hungry.”
“Oh, Will...”
“I got whupped a lot. All except for one place. I lived there for a half a year, maybe... it’s hard to remember exactly. And I’ve never been able to remember their names, but the woman used to read me books. She had this one with a real sad story I just loved called A Dog of Flanders, and there were drawings of a boy and this dog of his, and I used to think, Wow, it must be something to have a dog of your own. A dog would always be there, you know?” Will mused a moment, then cleared his throat and went on. “Well, anyway, this woman, the thing I remember about her most is she had green eyes, the prettiest green eyes this side of the Pecos, and you know what?”
“What?” Elly turned her face up to him.
Smiling down, he told her, “The first time I walked into this house that was what I liked best about you. Your green eyes. They reminded me of hers, and she was always kind. And she was the only one who made me think books were okay.”
For a moment they gazed at each other until their feelings came close to surfacing, then Elly said, “Tell me more.”
“The last place I lived was with a family named Tryce on a ranch down near a dump called Cistern. The old man’s watch came up missing and I figured soon as I heard what was up that they’d pin the blame on me, so I lit out before he could whup me. I was fourteen and I made up my mind as long as I stayed on the move they couldn’t stick me in any more schools where all the kids with ma’s and pa’s looked at me like I was a four-day-old pork chop left in somebody’s pocket. I caught a freight and headed for Arizona and I been on the road ever since. Except for prison and here.”
“Fourteen. But that’s so young.”
“Not when you start out like I did.”
She studied his profile, the dark eyes riveted on the ceiling, the crisp, straight nose, the unsmiling lips. Softly, she asked, “Were you lonely?” His Adam’s apple slid up, then down. For a moment he didn’t answer, but when he did, he turned to face her.
“Yeah. Were you?”
Nobody had ever asked her before. Had he been anyone from town, she could not have admitted it, but it felt remarkably good to answer, “Yeah.”
Their gazes held as both recognized a first fallen barrier.
“But you had a family.”
“A family, but no friends. I’ll bet you had friends.”
“Friends? Naww.” Then, after thoughtful consideration, “Well, one maybe.”
“Who?”
He tipped an eyebrow her way. “You sure you wanna hear this?”
“I’m sure. Who?”
He never talked about Josh. Not to anyone. And the story would lead to a conclusion that might make Eleanor Parker rethink her decision to invite him into her bed. But for the first time, Will found he wanted it off his chest.
“His name was Josh,” he began. “Josh Sanderson. We worked together on a ranch down near a place called Dime Box, Texas. Near Austin.” Will chuckled. “Dime Box was somethin’. It was like... well, maybe like watchin’ the black and white movie after seeing the previews in color. A sorry little dump. Everything kind of dead, or waitin’ to die. The people, the cattle, the sagebrush. And nothing to do there on your night off. Nothing.” Will paused, his brow smooth while his thoughts ranged back in time.
“So what’d you do?”
He shot her one quick glance. “This ain’t much of a subject for a wedding night, Eleanor.”
“Most wives already know this kind of stuff about their husbands by their wedding night. Tell me—what’d you do?”
As if settling in for a long talk, he rolled his pillow into a ball, crooked his head against it, lifted one knee and linked his fingers over his belly. “All right, you asked, I’ll tell you. We used to go down to La Grange to the whorehouse there. Saturday nights. Take a bath and get all duded up and take our money into town and blow damn near all of it on booze and floozies. Me, I wasn’t fussy. Take anyone that was free. But Josh got to liking this one named Honey Rossiter.” He shook his head disbelievingly. “Honey—can you believe that? She swore it was her given name but I never believed her. Josh did, though. Hell, Josh’d believe anything that woman told him. And he wouldn’t hear anything bad about Honey. Got real pissed off if I said a word against her. He had it bad for her, that’s a fact.
“She was tall—eighteen hands, we used to joke—and had this head full of hair the color of a palomino, hung clear down to her rump. It was some hair all right, curly but coarse as a horse’s mane, the kind a man could really sink his hands into. Josh used to talk about it, laying in his bunk at night—Honey and her honey hair. Then pretty soon he started talking about marrying her. Josh, I says, she’s a whore. Why would you want to marry a whore? Josh, he got real upset when I said that. He was so crazy over her he couldn’t tell truth from lies.
“She was like...” He rested a wrist on the updrawn knee, absently toying with a piece of green yarn on the quilt. “... well, like an actress in a picture show—played at being whatever a man needed. She’d change herself to suit the man, and when she was with Josh she acted like he was the only man for her. Trouble is, Josh started believing it.
“Then one night we came there and when Josh asked for Honey the old harlot who ran the place says Honey’s been spoken for for the next two hours. Who else would he like?
“Well, Josh never wanted anybody else, not after Honey. He waited. But by the time she come back down he was so steamed his lid was rattlin’ and he was ready to blow. She comes saunterin’ into the Leisure Room—that’s what they called the bar where the men waited on the women—and Lord a-mighty, you never heard such a squall as when Josh jumped her about who she was spendin’ two hours with while he was left downstairs coolin’ his heels.
“She says to him, You don’t own me, Josh Sanderson, and he says, Yeah, well, I’d like to. Then he pulls a ring out of his pocket and says he’d come there that night intendin’ to ask her to marry him.”
Will shook his head. “She laughed in his face. Said she’d have to be crazy to marry a no-count saddle bum who’d probably keep her pregnant nine months out of twelve and expect her to take care of a houseful of his squallin’ brats. Said she had a life of luxury, spendin’ a few hours on her back each night and wearing silk and feathers and eatin’ oysters and steak anytime she wanted ‘em.
“Well, Josh went wild. Told her he loved her and she wasn’t gonna screw anybody else—never. She was gonna leave with him—now! He made a grab for her and out of nowhere she pulls this little gun—Christ, I never knew the girls there even carried ‘em. But there it was, pointed right at Josh’s eye and I reached for a bottle of Old Star whiskey and let her have it. Hell, I didn’t think. I just... well, I just beaned her. She went down like a tree, toppled sideways and cracked her head on a chair and laid there in a puddle of broken glass and blended whiskey and hardly even bled, she died so fast. I don’t know if it was the bottle or the chair that killed her, but it didn’t matter to the law. They had me behind bars in less than half an hour.
“I figured things’d come out all right—after all, I was defending Josh. If I hadn’t clunked her, she’d have shot Josh smack through his left eye. But what I didn’t figure was how serious he was about marrying her, how broke up he was when she died.
“He...” Will closed his eyes against the painful memory. Eleanor sat up, watching his face closely.
“He what?” she encouraged softly.
Will opened his eyes and fixed them on the ceiling. “He testified against me. Told this sob story about how he was gonna make an honest woman out of Honey Rossiter, take her away from her lousy life in that whorehouse and give her a home and respectability. And the jury fell for it. I did five years for savin’ my friend’s life.” Will ran a hand through his hair and sighed. For seconds he stared at the ceiling, then rolled to a sitting position with arms loosely linked around his knees. “Some friend.”
Eleanor studied the moles on his back, wanting to reac
h out and touch, comfort. Like him, she’d had only one friend. But hers had turned out loyal. She could imagine how deep her own hurt would have gone had Glendon betrayed her.
“I’m sorry, Will.”
He threw his head aside as if to look back at her, but didn’t. Instead his gaze dropped to his loosely linked wrists. “Aw, what the hell. It was a long time ago.”
“But it still hurts, I can tell.”
He flopped back, ran both hands through his hair and clasped them behind his head.
“How’d we get on a subject like that anyway. Let’s talk about something else.”
The mood had grown somber, and as they lay side by side Eleanor could think of little except Will’s sad, friendless youth. She had always thought herself the loneliest soul on earth, but... poor Will. Poor, poor Will. Now he had her at least, and the boys. But how long would it last if the war came?
“Is the war really like that, Will... like they showed in the movies?”
“I guess so.”
“You think we’re gonna be in it, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. But if not, why is the President drafting men for the military?”
“If we were, would you have to go?”
“If I got drafted, yes.”
Her mouth formed an oh, but the word never made it past her lips. The possibility pressed upon her, bringing with it a startling dread. Startling because she hadn’t guessed she’d feel so possessive about this man once he was her husband. The fact that he was made a tremendous difference. The black and white pictures from the newsreel flashed through her memory, followed by the colored ones of the War Between the States. What an awful thing, war. She supposed, in the days when Grandpa had been alive, they would have prayed that America stay out of it. Instead, she closed her eyes and forced the grim pictures aside to make way for those of the beautiful ladies in their enormous silk skirts, and the men in their top hats, and Hopalong waving his hat... and Donald Wade in Will’s black one... and eventually when she rode the thin line between sleep and wakefulness, Will himself riding Topper, waving his hat at her from the end of the driveway...