It was late afternoon, the second time he saw her. But twice was enough. Something had been said. The movie had started.
They didn’t stay long. Harrison Glass and his wife stayed no more than an hour, Boaty eating a helping of everything, telling dirty jokes to red-faced Baptist men, laughing while the food dribbled down his chin, sweating like a pig, Sylvan nodding charmingly to everyone, but hardly speaking, staring off somewhere, one, two, glances in Charlie’s direction, no more. Her vague green eyes sparking into sudden sharp focus at the sight of his face, seemingly random glances, once, twice, a third time as her husband shut the car door for her. No more than that, but that was enough.
After they left there was some more eating, and a little dancing—although ordinarily the church didn’t much approve of it—until the shadows were long on the makeshift ball field and all the children were tired and the smell of cooking oil was thick in everybody’s clothes and all the oysters were gone.
THE TWILIGHT BEGAN to fall and then to fade, and Christmas lights out of somebody’s attic were turned on, but the children were arguing, and Ray Turner drove the Gadsden twins home to their big house, the biggest in town, because they didn’t drive and he was a good, careful boy. People began to leave after that, and the Baptist men and women began to clean up whatever the animals could get at, leaving the rest for tomorrow.
Charlie waved to the Haisletts and got into his truck and drove out to his land by the river, the night clear, the stars as close as the top of the willows by the river, and he lit a Lucky Strike and wrote one word in his diary, one Christian name. Then he drank his glass of whiskey and said his faithless prayers and lay out on the ground and slept with only one thing on his mind, burning bright in his eyes and torching his heart like music.
CHAPTER FIVE
FIRST OF ALL, this should be clear: She wasn’t a bad girl. She was a dreamer, and she wanted things, something, anything of her own. What girl doesn’t? What girl her age, coming out of what she came out of, wouldn’t go a long way to get closer to where she wanted to be in this world? She dreamed of movie stars years and years before she even saw a movie, and only when she finally saw her first one, hypnotized in the dark in the State Theater, could she even put a name to what it was she had always wanted.
Where did she get such ideas? From the time she was six, she listened to The Romance of Helen Trent on the radio. Helen Trent was always in love with and never saying yes to Gil Whitney, who wanted her with all his heart, even though she was thirty-five. On the show, Helen was always and forever thirty-five, and Sylvan hung on her every word, her every refusal of Gil’s love, forming the words the actors spoke, mimicking their ways, and maybe she learned it from there. For her, Helen Trent was a real person, frozen in time, speaking perfect English, and designing costumes for movie stars. Sylvan wanted to be like her, to have the life she had. Maybe the dreaming started there, maybe that’s why that thing, that way of being, caught her imagination and fired it up. Hollywood. The people and the clothes. The hopelessly elusive quality of true love. The kind of love that only little girls think is possible.
Where would a girl get such notions? Where do you get porcelain skin, or blonde hair or green eyes? They’re born in you, those ideas, and the patient ones wait, and the lucky ones find, and the smart ones get. She got.
You have to understand where she came from, what she came out of. If you heard the name she was born with, the one she had before she married Boaty Glass, you would laugh. Most people did. They laughed at her all the time in the first days. She was only seventeen and she knew they were laughing and she went about her life quietly, pretending to the world that it wasn’t happening the way it had happened every time she set foot in town.
This is America. She had a right. She had a right to be whoever she wanted to be, and she was becoming that person every minute of every day, long before she even knew who the person was. She, like the rest of the country, was always becoming, never just being, never at rest, and because now she’s part of a story, a story that gets told again and again, she just goes on becoming, even after anybody who actually knew or saw her is dead and gone. Most of us will be ended then, when we die, we will have become, but not her. So, in her way, she did get to be a movie star.
I knew her. I saw her. She was, I can promise you, a woman of quality.
She was remarkable, particularly considering where she came from, who her people were. Nowhere and nothing, that’s what. She was like a buried treasure until Boaty Glass got the idea in his head that he should take a wife, and that that wife, like everything else Boaty got, should be acquired cheaply and should be of the best quality. He got to be so rich because, from the time he was a boy, he could drive a bargain like a New York lawyer, and he got to be so fat because he couldn’t seem to find a limit, could never know how much was enough.
Ever notice how a fat man’s shirts never wrinkle? A skinny man, he’ll be a mess by noon, but a fat man’s flesh holds the cloth so tight, his shirt still looks pressed when he takes it off for bed.
Now think about Boaty, lying in his bed night after night, in that big house he had lived in all his life and couldn’t get rid of. After the war, people didn’t want that kind of thing any more, because families that had been together on the same land for two hundred years went their own ways and left nobody except the old ones to look after what the young ones called the “home place.”
Think of Boaty, forty-eight years old, five eight and 280 pounds, lying in his cold bed at night and dreaming of a young blonde girl who would be his wife and bear his children. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand he was a gross and greedy man, crafty enough to satisfy his greed. He just didn’t care. He just wasn’t built that way. Boaty was like a big round of dough that had never been baked into bread, worthless as nutrition, unfeeling and fat as risen flour paste.
Boaty had never been with a woman. Even before he got so huge, he was already gross in other ways, arrogant about his lineage, and unkempt and unruly in public and private. His knowledge of women was formed by the pages of girly magazines he bought in Staunton and kept in a box under his bed. He wore flesh-colored neckties that had pinup girls showing their breasts painted on the inside, and he thought it was cute to show these off to religious men at Rotary Club meetings.
But even Boaty Glass had feelings, although you’d never know it. Whatever else might be said about him, he’d worked hard all his life, and, rich as he was, he still lived alone. He’d seen the sad and mournful look on his mother’s face as she died, looking at her son, heavy, sad, childless, and rich. He felt he owed it to her, to himself, to have a wife and children, the best wife, stunning, acquired as cheaply and craftily as everything else, and children whose futures grew more grandiose with every passing night, the royalty of his own widening realm. Tall, handsome, muscular boys and lean, well-mannered girls. Popular children, children who would be sought after and asked everywhere, and who’d grow up to be successful and respected in a way Boaty knew he never would be.
So he lay in bed and dreamed until he couldn’t stand it any more, the rejections by the right girls from the right families, then he went out shopping. Picture it: touring the back roads of the county, in his black Cadillac, driving past farms, back up into hollows where they’d never even had electricity or indoor plumbing until about ten years before, where some children had never seen anybody who wasn’t related to them. Picture Boaty driving and just looking, looking at every female face he saw. Girls of twelve and thirteen, fifteen at the oldest, barefoot girls wearing their mother’s or sister’s dresses, hanging slack from the shoulders, billowing in the breeze around where their breasts had not yet grown. He liked the blonde-haired girls the best.
He found one girl. She was fourteen. She was standing on a porch back up in a hollow, holding a baby in her arms, staring off at the sky. Boaty stopped his car, got out, and went up on the porch to knock on the door. He talked first to her mother, while the girl wandered down to look at his
car, shyly putting the baby’s hand on its hot, shiny surface. Then he took out a roll of money and talked to the father, he guessed it was the father, a man who looked too old and tired to be her father but said he was, who stood stooped over in the door, big arms and a puny chest, and the man listened carefully to what Boaty had to say, the offer he had to make, and then he went and got his gun and just stood without saying anything, in the doorway, while Boaty raised his hands, his money still visible, and slowly backed down the stairs and to his car. He carefully got in and started the engine and purred away without saying another word.
Two miles down the road, he stopped the car and threw up in a ditch. He shook all the way back to town, shook until he was inside the safety of his own house.
Finally, he found her, way out in Arnold’s Valley. She was picking beans from a garden, dressed in a man’s white shirt and pants that must have belonged to a brother. She was taller than he’d hoped for, probably a little taller than he was, and older; she must have been at least fifteen.
She was girlish but already full and wide-hipped, her breasts making a real difference inside the man’s shirt. Her beautiful blonde hair hung to her waist, covering her face as she bent over to root among the vines, showing her angelic features as she stood up to put the beans in the basket slung on a leather strap over her shoulder. She wasn’t exactly the thing he’d set out to find, but the minute he saw her he knew she was the one.
This time the negotiations went better. He’d learned some diplomacy that didn’t cause a father’s hand to reach for the shotgun right off the bat. The mother answered the door, took one look at him in his black suit, the stomach straining the buttons of his white shirt, the mother barefoot on the wooden floor and holding, of course, another baby in her arms. She took one look and said, “I’ll get my husband,” and backed away into the shadow of the kitchen.
He appeared, a strong blond man who must have been ten years younger than his wife, or so it looked, although with those people it was always hard to tell. The men stayed young from hard work, the women got old from having babies year after year.
“Yes sir?” the man said. He looked suspicious but not lethal, a yard dog trained to be wary of strangers.
“I’ll say it straight out. I have a business proposition for you. One that’ll suit us both, I guarantee.”
“What kind of business?”
“Business that’ll change your life. Business that’ll put money in your pocket and a smile on your face.”
“I don’t need no life insurance, and I don’t want no encyclopedia.” The man started to close the door.
“This has to do, sir, with making you money, not you spending the money you worked so hard to make.”
There was a long pause while the man thought it over. “Well, you better come in.” So Boaty went inside, and, when his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw it for what it was, a poor place that never got clean, the woman having no time for cleaning what with all those babies, who seemed to be everywhere, all ages, all blond.
In a clean house, the knobs of things—doors, cabinets—are the first things to get dirty, because they’re always being touched by unclean hands. In a dirty house, those are the only things that are free from grime, because the hands that open and close the doors rub the filth and oil from them.
The house smelled like bacon fat and laundry detergent. The people smelled like bacon fat and pig shit and sweat.
“You want something? Whiskey? Coffee? Water?” and Boaty knew he should take something but he didn’t know what because the thought of the water scared him, so he accepted a small glass of clear whiskey that would probably kill him anyway, but he had to take something. The man had a glass of the liquor sitting on the kitchen table, the open jar next to it, and the stuff hadn’t killed him yet, so Boaty figured he could give it a try.
It tasted like copper and kerosene, but he drank it down quickly, because he knew that was what he was supposed to do. Then they set to talking.
“Let me be straight, friend. I want to buy your farm.”
The man drank down his moonshine and just stayed put for a while. He laughed.
“This farm? My farm?”
“How big is it?
“It’s a hundred and forty-two acres, all but twelve of which is shit, plain shit. Rock and limestone and dirt that’s been planted and fucked over for so long it’s near about dead. Man can’t hardly feed his family.”
“I’ll pay you two thousand dollars. Cash money. But that’s not the best part.”
“We wouldn’t have no place to go.”
“That’s the best part I was telling you about. You’d stay here. Nothing would change, except you wouldn’t have to pay the land taxes any more.”
“What’s the real deal here?”
Boaty waited while the man poured himself another shot and drank it down, his lips pursing to the edge of the glass like a baby at the nipple. When he had set the glass down, pushed his hair back from his eyes and looked up again, Boaty finally spoke. He spoke very quietly, and lowered his eyes, dipped his chin so that the roll of flesh rose around his buttoned white shirt. “I want the girl.”
“You what?”
“I want the girl. I want to marry her. Give her a better life.”
“How old are you?”
“Forty-three.” He thought of exaggerating even more, how would this man know, but he didn’t want to push his luck.
“I can’t do that.”
“Course you can. One less mouth to feed. A better life than you could give her. Three thousand dollars, let’s say; that’s a lot of money. And a tractor. I’ll buy you a new tractor.”
The man looked wistful, helpless. Having never been offered a choice in anything he ever did, even choosing a wife, the one he had being four months pregnant when they married, after having had a single encounter after a church supper when he was sixteen and didn’t even know how to do the thing with any respect or affection or thought. Again, now, he didn’t know what to do and knew there was nowhere to go for advice.
“Which girl?”
“She’s out there right now, picking beans in the garden.”
“Sylvan. My first girl. She’s got my heart, that girl.”
“And what’s that heart worth to her now, you reckon? How old is she?”
The man paused, ruffled his fingers. “Sixteen. I think. No, seventeen.”
“What use is a girl on a farm? What good is she to you now? You want her grabbed up by some trash? Maybe she has been already. She’s seventeen. I don’t pay top dollar for used goods. Maybe I should reconsider.”
“Sylvan is a good girl. She’s special. Not just to me. Ain’t nobody been near her, that’s for sure. I’ve been careful. Real careful.”
“Can she read?”
“Course she can read.”
“Mathematics?”
“Some. Not division. But she’s bright. Listens to all them shows on the radio.”
“Good. A good girl. A little older than I hoped, but she’ll do.”
“You’re the one that’s asking, mister. If you don’t want her, and I ain’t saying this is a done deal, you don’t want her, just walk away.”
“I’m offering you, say, three thousand dollars, a new tractor, and a better life for both you and your family and the girl Sylvan.”
“And I hear you and I’ll think about it. Now, with all due respect, I want you to leave my house.”
“There’s one condition,” Boaty said as he stood.
“Figured,” said the father.
“If she runs off on me, you lose the farm. I take it back, and you have nowhere to go. Understand?”
There was a long pause. “What if she dies or something else?”
Boaty hadn’t thought that far. “There is no something else,” he said. “No divorce. No running off. But I guess if she dies, you stay put. As long as she dies my wife. So it’s kind of ‘for richer or poorer’ for you, too. You got that?
“When she’s
gone, she’s gone. She won’t be coming back, and you won’t be seeing her. Not at Christmas, not at Easter. You’ll never see your grandchildren, at least not by her.”
“That’s pretty hard.”
“Life is hard, isn’t it?”
The man looked out the window at his oldest daughter, straining in the hot sun to find every last bean on the vine. The white shirt was soaked with sweat, and her hair clung in tendrils to her neck. Boaty thought she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
“I got to consider her. Whether she’d like it. Don’t even know I could convince her. She’s got ideas, like I said.”
“When can I come back?”
There was a long pause. Two men in a kitchen, the woodstove, always hot, the flypaper hanging down, encrusted, the whiskey clear and still in the jar, the girl in the garden, the boys bawling for lunch and the baby for the teat. For three whole minutes he sat and waited.
“Sunday week.”
“We understand each other? You get what I’m saying?”
“I ain’t stupid, sir. I heard every word. I’ll think on it.”
“Sunday week?”
“That’s what I said.”
“I’ll bring cash money.”
“I asked you to leave. I’d like you to do that now.”
They shook hands, like two men at a funeral. Boaty was careful not to wipe his hands on his pants until after he had gotten in the car and driven away, the girl standing in the garden, basket full, staring after his Cadillac until the dust had settled back on the road and the drone of the cicadas could be heard again, the wind rushing through the corn, replacing the swish of the car’s wheels, the dust from the dirt road blowing into the girl’s eyes.
When he went back in two weeks’ time, the girl was standing on the porch, wearing an old dress that was clean and smelled of sun and fresh night air. Beside her was a suitcase that Boaty gently explained to her she wouldn’t be needing. Her whole family was gathered around her, except the father, silent, dressed as though for Sunday church.