An April Love Story: A Cooney Classic Romance

  Lucas seemed to walk into the senior class and take over as Big Man On Campus. I wondered once if it surprised him as much as it surprised me.

  But he never went anywhere, either. He had as many chores waiting at the farm as I did.

  Connie was often sick with severe allergy problems, so at least one day a week I’d get on the bus and there’d be no Connie. I couldn’t even phone to say I hoped she’d be better, because we had no phone. I’d sit on the bus with a little fourth grader named Eloise, who always wanted me to check her math homework.

  In October, Susannah wrote to say she’d been to a dance at a nightclub and was going up to a fraternity party at Syracuse with a boy she’d met who was a really good-looking number and so suave, and she was trying for early acceptance to college.

  I knew only nine people at Valley who wanted to go to college, and two of them were Lucas and me.

  Lucas and I hopped off the bus one day to hike up the lane for home when he said, “Marnie, they’ve asked me to be on the basketball team.”

  Nobody had asked me to be on anything. “You aren’t athletic,” I said. “It’s all you can do to walk on the bottoms of your feet.”

  “Very funny, Marnie.”

  “They didn’t really ask you,. Lucas. They had a class assignment in sarcasm.”

  “Of which I suppose you’re the teacher,” he said.

  I knew I was being ugly and unfair to him. I knew I should congratulate him and tell him how much he’d changed for the better. But I couldn’t. Just thinking of teams made me think of cheerleading back home and how that was closed to me forever. “Don’t get excited about it,” I said to Lucas. “They only want you because you’re tall, and Valley men tend to be short.”

  “I can always count on you for an encouraging word, can’t I?” He walked on ahead, his long legs covering the ground half again as fast as mine.

  Lucas has changed for the better, I thought. I’ve gotten worse.

  At dinner Lucas brought up the basketball team, but our parents merely looked confused and annoyed. “You can’t be on a team,” they said. “There’s practice time, evening games, all sorts of precious time wasted by that sort of thing. We need you for the apples.”

  If it had been me I’d have had a tantrum.

  Lucas merely accepted it without arguing. I guess he knew that they really did need him for the orchard and that the way we’d chosen to live—or they’d chosen—didn’t leave space for basketball teams.

  Instead, after school, we’d throw down our books, change into our oldest jeans and jackets, and head for the orchards. Endlessly we plucked apples, using little basketlike prongs on a long stick, filling bushels, loading the bushels on the tractor-drawn trailer, arguing about who got to stop picking apples for fifteen minutes and take the bushels back to the barn.

  In school my favorite class was study hall. I never studied. I just sat there and let my eyes glaze over, sleeping awake, more or less.

  We sold our apples to a man who had a huge refrigerated storage barn and we made enough to break even and cover the beginning costs of running the orchard for the next year, but we didn’t make enough to live on over the winter.

  So from the middle of November until spring, Mother, Aunt Ellen, and I baked bread, pies, and cakes for the mountain resort on the far side of the village. You have to bake an awful lot to earn anything resembling money. I wanted new school clothes so much, and my clothes from sophomore year were not only tight and short, but out of style—at Valley, girls wore much more conservative styles: a lot of pullover sweaters over oxford shirts. “I need new everything,” I said, “most of all shoes.”

  Mother sewed a few things for me, but as for the rest, “You want them, you earn them,” she told me flatly. So I made specialties of sweet potato pie, apple turnovers, and apple crisps. It took me till January to earn a shopping spree. Lucas drove me into the county seat, a town about twenty miles away, where they featured a sixteen-shop mall arranged around an indoor fountain. We both nearly died at the prices. “It was a lot more fun when I had a clothing allowance and went to Bloomingdale’s,” I said.

  Lucas looked longingly at a pair of sneakers (thirty-four dollars) and I wanted the makeup kit in the tortoise shell case for thirty-six. We bought sneakers at the dime store for a dollar eighty-nine and I took lipstick from a brand x rack for fifty-nine cents. “I don’t see what’s so neat about being poor,” I said. “Why do our parents want to live like this?”

  “They had money, Marnie. It didn’t make them happy. Working on the farm does. They love it, every minute of it. They really don’t much care that they’re broke.” There was a sadness in Lucas’ voice that stopped me short. I was peevish, I complained a lot, sometimes I was really miserable, but whatever Lucas’ emotion was, it was much deeper than mine. It made me feel like a little girl, as if Lucas understood things I never would, and anger boiled up in me at all the things I was missing, and I stomped back to the car.

  That winter we warmed our house with wood Lucas and I had cut and split. We popped popcorn that I grew, harvested, dried, and stored. The flowers on the table my mother had grown and dried hanging from the kitchen rafters. With her new loom, Aunt Ellen wove a beautiful tablecloth.

  Our first Christmas on the farm we had roast duck (our own), sweet and white potatoes, beans, beets, stewed tomatoes (our canning), three kinds of bread, homemade cheese, and three kinds of pie. Everything from our own gardens and hands. Mother gave me a beautiful pantsuit she’d sewn during her spare time (I’d never noticed any spare time lying around!). It was a dark yellow denim, with a tiny bit of embroidery on the lapel. Lucas got the magazine subscriptions he’d been pining for. My parents bought each other things like butter presses and extra kerosene lanterns, and spent the whole day laughing delightedly.

  The barn cat sneaked into the kitchen to have kittens under the sink and by evening the first snow was falling.

  Even I had to admit there had never been such a beautiful Christmas.

  “I’m going to build a solar greenhouse,” said Lucas, brandishing a library book with blueprints and instructions. “Raise tomatoes so we can have fresh ones for salad in the dead of winter.”

  “Lucas, I canned at least forty million tomatoes. Have mercy. There’s nothing I want less than more tomatoes. Raise flowers.”

  Aunt Ellen began teaching me to use the loom and I wove a slightly crooked placement.

  Our goat had kids and we bought another couple of goats, too, because we’d found a health food store that would buy everything made of goats’ milk that we could sell them.

  “Marnie,” said Connie. “If I tell you a secret, will you promise not to tell anybody?”

  “Sure.”

  “Julie Fitzhugh has a crush on Lucas.”

  “On Lucas?”

  “Oh, Marnie, just because you never notice him! He’s the handsomest thing in this school. He’s so tall and strong and he knows about absolutely anything you can think of. From French literature to how to build hen coops. From Phoenician civilization to fixing tractors. And he’s always so courteous and calm and nice, and he has that marvelous smile.”

  I actually turned around in the school bus to have another look at Lucas.

  “Does he date anyone, Marnie?” Connie wanted to know.

  “No. He’s never had time, I guess. Or the money.” I thought of Susannah’s dating ladder. I’d fallen off it, but Lucas never even had a chance to get on. He hadn’t been dating back home and here he couldn’t get started, although obviously he was very popular.

  “Julie wanted to know if you’ve ever held hands with Lucas.”

  “Once. When we were both reaching for the same chicken egg.”

  “Ah. Romance,” said Connie.

  It was twenty-six degrees out and snowing and the wind was blowing off the mountains as if it wanted to strip our hill of its apple trees. And I had to walk outside to use the bathroom. Halfway between the house and my destination, I looked up into the fa
lling snow and yelled at the whistling wind, “I hate this damn outhouse! Someday I’m going home! To a city, where people know how to live. Where you date. And walk on sidewalks. And the milk comes in cartons. And the bathrooms are inside!”

  The snow kept falling and the outhouse was colder than ever.

  One blustery January day when the school bus was late, and I’d stepped in an icy puddle and discovered a hole in my boots (the boots we couldn’t afford to replace), and Lucas had lost a glove and had one hand balled up in his pocket, taking it out now and then to huff on it, he said suddenly, “Marnie, let’s run away.”

  “Great idea. Where shall we go? Bahamas? Virgin Islands?”

  “No airfare. Don’t you have any loving relatives who’d give us shelter?”

  “Two of them. They live down the lane in a drafty farmhouse with your two loving relatives.”

  “Oh. You mean those back-to-the-land types.”

  “Right. The ones whose hearts are pure and whose sweat is honest.”

  “And whose teenagers are rebellious.”

  We laughed. When the bus came, Connie wasn’t there again, and I sat with Lucas for the very first time. For the very first time, we talked, not about goats or wood, but about ourselves. “I was sort of hoping the whole experiment would be doomed to failure,” I said.

  “Me, too. So far there are no signs of adult enthusiasm wearing thin.”

  “Well, hang in there, Lucas. Only six more months and you’ll be off at college somewhere.”

  The pain I’d seen on his face before settled back in. His features turned bleak and miserable. “I’m not going to college, Marnie,” he said simply. “They can’t make a success of the orchard without another full-time worker. And the only one around for free is me.”

  “Not go to college? But your whole life had been a preparation for college!”

  “Dad says college merely leads to a diploma that is but a piece of paper. Meaningless. Superficial. I’m an adult now, he says, and I’m needed at home with my family, helping to earn the daily bread.”

  “Oh, Lucas, how terrible! Did they make it an order? You have to stay?”

  “No, they wouldn’t do that. I’m eighteen now and I don’t think they could force me to stay. Or that they want to use force. But they can’t give me a dime and you can’t go to college, even local state colleges, without an awful lot of dimes. Besides, they’re right, they do need me.”

  “Oh, Lucas!” My heart ached for him. I could hardly stand to see the slump that had taken over not just his posture, but his face as well. I’d have hugged him, patted him, if it would have helped. But he didn’t need me. He needed a different future.

  Lucas shrugged, leafing through his schoolbooks with a detached longing. For Lucas, learning was something exciting. College had meant knowledge all around him, spilling out of books and professors and laboratories and libraries, waiting for him to scoop it up. And now learning was going to stop here, with a high school reader.

  “Are you going to stay, then?” I asked.

  “I suppose so. I owe it to my parents, I guess.”

  I remembered Eve—so long ago it seemed like another world—saying Lucas’ profile was fine, it was his personality that worried her. It seemed to me that both his profile and his personality were in pretty good shape. It would be an incredible sacrifice for him to stay, and from what I knew of the way he’d behaved all year, he’d do it cheerfully, too. Not bothering the adults with his complaints. Not like Marnie, who drowned people in complaints. “What did you want to study at college, Lucas?”

  “Literature. Wanted to be a college professor.”

  A year ago I’d have said he looked like a college professor. Sort of weedy and bookwormy. But not now.

  “But I’m not sure anymore,” he said, surprising me. “Farming really has opened my eyes to a lot of things. I don’t want to be a farmer, but sometimes I think I’ve learned as much working around those apple trees as I would have sitting around a library. In a way, there’s a lot more satisfaction learning things by struggling with them, right there, in the field, than by reading about them.” He laughed a little. “Although I don’t relish thinking about being here on the farm permanently. I suppose if I really get desperate, I can always join the Army.”

  “I thought you were a pacifist.”

  “I’ve decided that nobody who can behead his own chickens and ducks is a pacifist.” He sighed, fingers stroking his calculus text. “And now that I think of it,” he said, obviously making himself be lighthearted again, “the Army may use outhouses, too.”

  “How uncivilized of them,” I said. “I’m sure you’re wrong. I think trenches were left behind in the First World War.”

  “Different kind of trench, ding-a-ling,” said Lucas, standing up to get off the bus. He grinned at me, made a fist, and gave my nose a gentle tap. And by the time he’d turned away, the strangest thing had happened to me.

  I’d fallen in love with Lucas Peterson.

  Chapter VIII

  IT WAS EMBARRASSING TO be in love with Lucas.

  Every time I remembered all the dreadful things we had said about him back home, I’d get flushed and hot. That first week this happened so often my mother noticed and wanted to know if I was coming down with something. “No,” I said, thinking that I had already come down with it.

  It seemed ridiculous to me that I could be head over heels in love with someone for whom I’d had no use all my life. (Head over heels, it turned out, was a good description—I felt fizzy, as if I’d been carbonated!) And it happened so quickly. No warning buzzers, no premonitions of fate, no foreshadowings of things to come the way they do in Gothics. Just a silly remark and a grin and I was caught up in emotions I’d never had before.

  It was no wonder they called this a “crush.” It sat there in the front of my mind, and smushed everything else. My thoughts of Lucas were so constant and so, heavy they weighted me down at the same time that I was fizzing.

  It was, all in all, a wonderful feeling.

  It would have been even more wonderful if Lucas had noticed.

  He was oiling the hinges on the barn door. “Can I help?” I said. How handsome he was, bent over that hinge, oil dripping down onto his fingers.

  “Oh, did you want to do this?” he said. “Great.” He handed the oil can to me. “Do all the doors and the barnyard gates, too. Now I can get to that broken well pump handle.”

  And off he strode. Out of sight. Leaving me with oil dripping down my fingers, which was for some reason not a handsome thing at all, but infuriating.

  He tore a hole in his favorite sweater and I said, “Here, I’ll darn the hole,” taking the sweater from him. Aunt Ellen said, “Lord have mercy, did I hear Marnie actually make an offer to mend something?” Everyone laughed except Lucas, who was already back in his bedroom getting another sweater. Aunt Ellen mended it after all, because when I tried I just made lumps.

  I brushed my hair more. I changed my clothes more. Lucas said, “You’re going to bring in wood wearing that?”

  We’d said back home that Lucas had a voice like a newborn foghorn. But Lucas’ frame had expanded to fit the voice, and now it was a fine deep baritone like a TV commentator’s. I daydreamed about how “I love you” would sound in Lucas’ beautiful voice. I didn’t even hear “I like you.” He spoke to the goats more than he talked to me.

  Mother announced that she wanted to have roast chicken for dinner, which meant killing and plucking the chicken. That’s something you don’t fully realize when you first raise animals: that they’re going to be quite hard to eat if nobody kills them. For a while you decide to be a vegetarian. For a while you go right on raising the chickens but you drive downtown and buy your chicken meat at the grocery, where it’s all neatly wrapped and somebody else killed it. After that you get your neighbor Mr. Shields to do it for you in exchange for eggs. Eventually you get somewhat hardened to it and you learn to do it yourself. The six of us always tried to be gone when i
t was chicken-slaughter time. In fact, Aunt Ellen got migraines quite regularly whenever meat was on the menu and my father invariably found he’d made an urgent appointment with … with … well, he couldn’t remember, but it was urgent.

  “I’ll do it,” sighed Lucas.

  I wanted so much to be with Lucas I actually volunteered to do it with him. “Job’s all yours,” said Lucas. “Give my regrets to the hens.”

  “I wanted to do it with you, not for you,” I said, but he was long gone.

  I did get to help Lucas build his solar greenhouse. This consisted of Lucas muttering and stewing over his blueprints and his lists, making careful marks on his lumber and saying to me, “Hold it higher, Marnie.” “No, Marnie, no, for pete’s sake, this end.”

  This association came to a bloody end because I was so busy daydreaming about Lucas’ beautiful strong hands and how they would feel holding mine that I nailed his palm instead of the butt joint. After a trip to the hospital and a tetanus shot and some stitches, Lucas was not terribly thrilled to have my help anymore.

  One afternoon Lucas didn’t get on the schoolbus.

  He’s run away, I thought. He couldn’t take it anymore, and he left.

  Without me, I thought. He asked me to run away with him. I should have taken him up on it.

  But he wouldn’t actually have wanted me along. Lucas and I were barely friends, let alone ready to run off together. He never confided in me, with the single exception of that conversation on the bus, when he’d been so down he’d even been willing to talk to me.

  I remembered every single mean crack I’d ever made to Lucas, and there were quite a lot of them. If only I could have a recall, the way they do cars from Detroit.

  I wondered just what Lucas really did think of me. As the girl who put holes in his hand? The girl who shoveled out the chicken coop? The girl who got in his way and took up his space and insulted him?

  I poked around the house all afternoon, worrying about where he’d gone, wondering if I’d ever see him again. I didn’t dare say anything to our parents. They might call the police, or the principal, or almost anything. I’d long given up predicting their moves.