“Jonathan, jealous? That’ll be the day. He’s so filled with his own plans that he wouldn’t know if he was eating roofing shingles spread with moss.”
“Oh, that’s just his way, Aaron. He’s not as hard as he seems.”
“I’ve lived with him longer than you have, and I know all about his ‘ways,’ as you call them,” Aaron said, “and some of them I don’t condone.”
Annie approached, bringing bowls of steaming, rich soup to set before them. When she left, Mary put her spoon absently into the broth, studying it as she said, “Some of them I don’t condone, either.”
Aaron leaned his forearms on the edge of the table, looking at her. “Mary, we’re playing cat-and-mouse with each other, and it isn’t necessary. Can’t we just pretend we’re the same Aaron and Mary we always were and forget Jonathan and all the rest?”
She was still toying with her soup, but flicked a glance up at his face, then quickly away again. “It’s not easily forgotten.”
And it wasn’t.
The rest of the meal was eaten in silence, broken only by remarks on the tastiness of Annie’s cooking. They truly had lost the old easiness between them.
Finally Aaron asked, “Mary, if we can’t make it through a ham dinner together, how will we make it through two or three nights?”
She hadn’t expected his candor, and it stopped her cold. Having her mouth full gave Mary time to think of an answer, but there was none. She didn’t know how they’d do it. Swallowing the mouthful, eyes wide, she gulped. “I don’t know, Aaron.”
They sat there looking at each other and wondering together what the answer was.
“Do you want some dessert, Mary?”
“No, thank you. I think we’d better leave now.”
“Give me a minute to pay for this and I’ll be right with you,” he said, going to find Annie and pay the bill.
Annie Halek was like the town tap: turn her on and she ran off at the mouth until she either ran dry or was turned off. Aaron worried now that she might have read something into his and Mary’s attitudes, something to pass on to other customers. If so, there was little he could do about it. He buttered her up a little, anyway, saying, “That dinner was the best in town, Annie.”
“Well, now, I might get swellheaded at that if mine wasn’t the only restaurant in Browerville,” the big woman said, laughing. But she had seen nothing around the highbacked booth, and even if she had, Annie Halek would consider it a compliment to her cooking that folks could be so engrossed in eating they hardly spoke a word through an entire meal.
The luxury of a meal in a café was an unaccustomed treat for Mary, and in spite of the uneasiness between herself and Aaron, there was a relaxed air of freedom about the day. As they came out of the dim café into the dazzling sunlight, the day enhanced the feeling. No field work, no cooking, no responsibilities awaited them until evening. They turned to walk the short distance to the end of the boardwalk, but their steps were slow. At the end, when they reached the street corner, he took her arm as she stepped down. He released her elbow then as they walked the block to Anson’s place, but once again at the buggy he took her arm to hand her up. His courtesies filled her with a warm, protected feeling. Once again seated in the buggy, Aaron asked, “Would you like the bonnet up before we start?”
“Heavens no, Aaron. I love the sun on my face.”
“That’s good. So do I.”
And heading out of town she reveled in the magic of the golden Minnesota day. When viewed from the height of the buggy seat, it was like gliding along on a low-flying cloud, passing the smells and sights and sounds of the countryside as an angel might ride on her way through heaven. The first wild roses had been too impatient to wait for June. They threw their fragrance from ditches and meadows in tantalizing appeal, competing with wild plum, apple, and lilac. They winked pinkly at the passing rig while great whorls of white blossoms hung half-concealed where copses bordered the road. Katydids played their high-pitched wings in duet with the frogs that thrummed hoarse voices from patches of marshland where red-winged blackbirds bobbed and swayed atop last year’s exploding cattails. Crows teased the horses, hesitating at the edge of the road ahead until the last possible moment before rising in awkward fashion, flapping unwieldy wings that somehow drew them aloft. Meadowlarks fluted their elusive clarion call, unaware that it checked human breath until it was repeated. The rig rocked along, accompanied by bugs, blossoms, and birds, and the magic of the day healed something between the two people.
“Imagine living in the city all your life and missing this,” Mary said.
“One year in the city was enough for me,” Aaron said, “let alone all my life.”
“You don’t know how lucky you were to grow up here and have all this around you. Sometimes, like on a day like this, I can hardly believe I wasn’t born here, too. I feel like I was, like all this was born right into me.”
“Don’t you ever miss Chicago?”
“It’s not the place a person misses, it’s the people in it, and there are none of my people left there since Daddy died. Aunt Mabel and Uncle Garner are the only ones now—and they’re here. But sometimes I can’t help feeling guilty that I came to their house that summer. Like if I’d stayed in Chicago, Daddy might still be alive.”
“His death was an accident, and if you’d been there, it wouldn’t have prevented it. Accidents happen in the factories like that all the time, but in the city nobody seems to care. That’s the worst part about the city—nobody caring.” He was pensive, recalling that lonely time on his own. But the day was too bright for sad recollections.
“I’d just as soon not remember it, and I’m sure you wouldn’t, either,” Aaron said, shrugging off the memories.
But Aaron never talked much about city life, and she often wondered why.
“Didn’t you make any friends while you were there?” she asked.
“Friends? Not exactly.”
“If not friends, then what?”
“Just…acquaintances. Nobody it bothered me to leave when I came back here,” Aaron answered, remembering hard women, hard bosses, hard faces in the streets.
“Were any of them women?” She braved the question, suddenly wanting to know.
He glanced at her askance, a partial smile teasing one corner of his mouth now. “What does it matter?” he asked.
She flipped her hands palm-up to signify it didn’t matter at all. “Oh, no matter.” Then with a sudden shift of her shoulders she adopted the air of a proper city lady, one palm resting on the handle of an imaginary parasol, the other lightly upon the arm of an imaginary escort.
“I’ll bet they were. And I’ll bet they took your arm as you crossed the street and said, ’Why, Aaron Gray, wherever did you learn such fine chivalry?”
He raised an elbow up beneath her hand, becoming her escort.
“Why, shucks, ma’am,” he said in a drawling voice, “way up in Moran Township, but I didn’t think you noticed.”
“Notice! Why I declare! A blind woman would notice!”
“That’s funny, ma’am,” he bantered, “all you city girls gave me the idea that the last thing you wanted was chivalry.”
“Don’t be foolish, Mr. Gray,” she answered in her city-girl voice. “We’re no different than those country girls back home. We love it.”
They laughed then, passing a piece of woods where jays scattered their own raucous laughter back at them, but somehow, as their laughter trailed down, the game lost its lightness. She removed her hand from his arm.
He tended to his driving again but replied, “If you’ll pardon my manners, ma’am, I must disagree. There’s no comparing the city girls with the ones back home.”
But he was dead serious now, and Mary, too, dropped the charade as she told him, “I never meant to compare the two.”
“Then you truly must pardon my manners,” Aaron apologized.
“There’s nothing wrong with your manners,” she said. “They’re all a girl cou
ld ask for.”
He considered that for some time before asking pointedly, “Is that what you thought last Saturday night?”
At the mention of that Saturday night, Mary felt a panic begin to rise within her.
“I wasn’t talking about last Saturday night,” she corrected. “I was talking about today. I just meant that it’s nice to have a man take my arm again and hand me into the buggy or into a booth. Sometimes a husband forgets to do those things.”
“All right, so today I’m chivalrous. But what about last Saturday? Was I chivalrous then?”
Her heart beat an erratic tattoo. “I don’t know what you mean, Aaron,” she denied.
“Yes, you do. I mean was I being chivalrous when I held the hand of my brother’s wife in a manner unlike a brother-in-law?”
“It was just the ointment, that’s all.”
“Like hell it was, Mary.” He said it very quietly, the very gentleness of his tone adding impetus to the words. “Was it the ointment at the dance, too? Where was my chivalry then?”
“It wasn’t your fault, Aaron. You were practically forced into dancing with me.”
“Quit trying to kid yourself, Mary. You know that I wanted you then, and we both know it was wrong. I was about as chivalrous as a fox paying a call on the hen house.”
“No, Aaron. It wasn’t wrong. We didn’t do anything. If you think you were to blame for something, then maybe so was I. I shouldn’t have stayed with you through that second dance.” It seemed an admission of her wanting him. “It’s just that we feel guilty because of the thing Jonathan suggested, that’s all.” And even as she said it, the rocking motion of the rig brought Aaron’s arm next to her own. She knew she must not think about his nearness. Oh, God, why had she let Jonathan go on the train?
“We shouldn’t have let Jonathan go on that train,” Aaron said.
It was like trying to douse a fire with kerosene, his saying exactly what she’d been thinking.
“I tried not to think about you after that night.”
“You ought not talk about it, Aaron,” she warned. She willed him to stop now, before it was too late.
“No, I ought not…” There he stopped and they rode in silence a while until he seemed to pick up the thread of thought and pull it toward himself. “But if I don’t, it would be cheating you.”
It did seem like cheating to hold back these feelings, much as he realized the real cheating would be to give them vent. He thought again of how little Jonathan had seemed to see in her that night.
“Would it be all right if I just tell you how beautiful you were in your yellow dress that night?” he asked. But he kept his eyes on the road ahead, feeling her arm bump against his now and then, welcoming it.
“Not if I just said thank you and we ended it right there,” she told him.
“I’ll end it right there,” he said, and tried to mean it.
Once again the motion of the buggy worked its magic and calmed them as it undulated, seeming to sway in rhythm with the trees bordering Turtle Creek. The horses had slowed, sensing their driver’s lack of haste. The warm sun, the spring breeze, and the slow pace hypnotized the two riders. But slipping along through a world of bursting blossoms and nectar smells with their arms touching, there began the halting transition from friendship to fervor, for they were lulled out of their common good sense when some magical force, some unseen hand smoothed their brows, cupped their jaws, and turned their faces toward one another. They did not remember doing so on their own. Hadn’t they been studying the road, the passing fields, just a minute ago?
But here was Mary, her face upturned toward his. Aaron gazed down at her then, and she back at him. And the goodness of it flooded them both after the days of effort to avoid even the slightest contact. The horses carried them along up the road, and the rocking rig beneath them swayed their bodies in unison as sun-drenched eyes held, brown meeting blue, unsmiling, yet so penetrating.
After they’d had an introduction into one another’s eyes, they explored farther. He raised his gaze to her hair and saw the sun radiate off its lustrous richness, and he wondered how it felt when its heavy weight was released into a man’s hand. He saw the sun on her forehead, glinting off tiny drops of moisture, and he thought he’d like to touch them with his tongue and know the taste of her. Following the line of her fine, high cheeks he came to her mouth. It hadn’t learned to smile at him, but he knew somehow that it would.
She looked at him as if for the first time. With all the glory of the day before her, she saw what she’d never seen before, the sun sending prisms of light from the hairs of his eyebrows, which at last had relaxed from their frown, down the fine, clean line of his nose and the shadow it made on his lip below. His beautiful, wide mouth was relaxed. His breathing was deep. She remembered the strawberry and bay rum smell of him, his breath on her from that other time, and wished for the taste of it now. She studied his skin and saw that the whiskers grew in a pattern that swept toward his jaws. She wished to stroke it in the direction they grew. She thought momentarily of Jonathan’s face, wondered if she knew it as intimately as she suddenly did Aaron’s, but she could not conjure up his image, couldn’t ever remember studying his whiskers, his eyebrows, or his mouth.
Then they became Mary and Aaron again, separate, studying the road, the fields, studying them as foreigners, for it seemed they’d never seen them before.
The horses pulled the rig into the yard and stopped under the elms from long practice. Strangely enough, Aaron did not help Mary alight. They each jumped down from their own side, and Mary went to the house while Aaron led the horses down toward the lean-to to remove their harnesses and set them out to graze.
It was a time without hurry. Aaron’s thoughts took their time, as he did, finding small things to do, filling the hours until supper. He found seed corn in the granary and hoisted the sacks onto his shoulder and carried them to the lean-to to wait until morning. Her eyes seemed to be following him as he went, yet she was nowhere to be seen. He went to check the marker, a flat bed of equally spaced two-by-fours used to drag the soil, leaving behind it four clearly marked, evenly spaced checkrows to lay the seeds in. He found it needed tightening after the warping winter, got hammer and nails, and fixed it for morning. And all the while, the color of her honey hair remained in his eyes, nearly blinding him.
Mary had changed her dress for a simple work frock and went to check the goose eggs. They were still brooding under cluck hens, and each day she walked to the well in the yard and pumped a can full of water for them as she did now. She saw Aaron’s Sunday suit coat hanging on a fence post down past the granary and wondered what he was busy at. His face came back to her, watching her as she went. Taking the water to the hen house, she turned each goose egg and sprinkled it. She filled the waterers and feeders and looked in each cubicle for chicken eggs, but found only a few, scarce at this time of year. Leaving the hen house, she saw Aaron’s coat was gone from the fence post. He’d gone to the house to put dungarees on, and she met him coming out as she went in.
He stepped onto the porch, holding the screen door open for her to pass into the kitchen. On the threshold above him she turned, saying, “Aaron, I’ll help you with the milking or anything you want.”
He stood a step lower than she, but his brown eyes were nearly on a level with hers. She couldn’t see them as clearly as earlier, standing as they were in the shade of the porch. But what details she couldn’t make out, she remembered.
He smiled then, not with his mouth but with his eyes. “I don’t need any help, but I’d enjoy your company in the barn.”
“I’ll be there,” she promised.
She had enough wood in the box for a new fire, so she laid and lit one in the cold stove, then took the empty pails from the buttery, heading for the barn. They met by the well and walked down together. The cows had accommodated them by hovering around the barn tonight, and when the big east door opened, it took little encouragement to get them inside. The sound
of their hooves on the cement floor filled the space as much as the huge bulks did. The barn always seemed so vast when it was empty and so small when the cows came in.
Aaron took a milk stool and pail and evaded a switching tail as he settled in a squat beside the first cow. Mary, too, took a spot beside a cow. When he heard the first ring of the milk in her pail, he said, “There’s no need for you to help, Mary.”
“Don’t be silly, Aaron,” she said. “I’m not so helpless I can’t give you a hand.” But his rhythm was nearly double that of hers, and he’d already moved on to the second cow while she was still struggling with her first. Her unaccustomed hands needed frequent rests. When she’d resumed her stroking, the muscles of her forearms grew hot and tight. She lay her forehead against the warm, wide belly of the cow while she waited for her muscles to relax.
He came around the cow and saw her like that. “Here, let me finish her.”
Mary turned her face toward him, her forehead still resting on the cow, and said, “Fine help I am, huh?”
“I told you your company was all I needed. You’d better get out of there before that old gal decides she’s all done giving out and heads for the door.”
She did as she was told, and while she waited for him to finish the job, found the empty tins and brought them near so Aaron could squirt them full for the eager cats. Standing beside him, she looked down over his bent head as he filled the tins. She came near to putting her hand down onto his heavy russet curls, but he finished and handed her the tins and her hands were saved from folly. She stayed away from him then until he finished, and spent her time trying to coax the unfriendly cats toward her. Freedom had made them skeptics, and they came near enough only to cadge their warm drink before scampering away.
“You go on up to the house. It’s getting cool out here, and I’ll be up in a minute,” he said.
“Okay, but I thought I’d help you carry the milk up,” she said.
“I’ll bring it when I come. Just go on in and tend to supper.”
While she began cooking supper, he came in with the milk pails. Before she could turn from the stove to fetch fresh dish towels to cover the pails, he was there at the breakfront, taking them from the drawer, something he’d never done before. He acted different, with Jonathan gone, almost as if he were playing the master of the house. When he turned to the pump to wet the towels, he found her watching his movements, her back to the stove. She thoroughly enjoyed his doing for her the small task that had always been her duty.