“I didn’t tell her anything about us. There’s nothing to tell.”
“Well, she seems to think she should defend you.”
“Maybe I need defense against you.”
They were dancing now, but she stayed her distance and he didn’t press her, didn’t pull her against him in the old way.
“I didn’t come here to fight,” he said.
“What, then, to make a conquest?”
“No, to make an apology.” And he meant it.
“It’s too late for that. I don’t want it anymore.”
“What do you mean ‘anymore’?” he asked.
“I mean I’ve had time to do some thinking this week, and I’ve decided you’re right. Why should I put all my apples in one basket? Maybe I’ll pass a few around.”
“Come on, Pris, let me take you home and we can at least talk this out.”
“Sorry, Aaron, I already told Willy Michalek he could take me home.”
He really hadn’t figured she’d move that fast, and it irked him.
“Passing your apples around already?” he couldn’t help taunting. “Look out, Priscilla, too many passes and you’ll be applesauce.”
There was a sudden stab of pain in his right foot as Pris’s heel mashed it onto the floorboards. He tightened his grip around her waist with his arm and lifted her until her toes dangled above the floor. His foot hurt like hell, but it took both feet flat on the floor to hold her aloft.
“Aaron, you put me down this instant! If you don’t I’ll smash something else!” And her legs were thrashing against his. But he held her as she was, her hips pressed smack against his, her breasts tight against his chest, and an arm still around his shoulders. She grabbed a handful of his shirt to keep from tipping sideways.
“Anything you say, Miss Applesauce,” he grinned as he let her slide down against the front of him, all the way to the floor.
“You want someone to take home?” she flung at him. “There! Try one of them?” And she pointed to the group of chippies who were near the door in their usual place. “They’re more your type!”
The dance was done, and she spun off toward her table. He followed, trying to appear as though he were showing her back to her place. But it was easy to see she was practically running to escape him.
Well, he’d known she’d take some gentling, hadn’t he? He’d give her a bit more time and then try again. He’d see her at church tomorrow. Maybe then he’d have better luck.
But the following morning when he approached her in the churchyard, he could tell she was as sour as she’d been the night before.
“Hello, Priscilla,” he said, attempting to neutralize her with an engaging smile.
She was having none of it.
“Will you come and have breakfast with me and Jonathan and Mary today?”
“I hardly think so,” she answered coldly.
“How long are you going to keep this up? I apologized, didn’t I? Will you give me a chance to make it right?”
“You had your chance for a whole year.”
“Well, I’ll take another day if you got it.” He tried to take her elbow, but she avoided his touch.
“I don’t think you’ll take anything more from me.”
“Did you have that good a time with Michalek last night?”
“At least he’s a gentleman.”
He grew angry. His crime had been wanting her and having demonstrated it, that was all.
“Pris, it isn’t every day I push you up against the corncrib wall. Can’t you forget it?”
“Aaron Gray, you stand here making light of it right smack on the Lord’s doorstep!”
“I figure the Lord’s got enough to do without slappin’ my hands for putting them where He intended they ought to be put, anyway.”
He was teasing, but he never should have said that, for she swirled in a quick, dust-lifting turn and strode away, and Aaron realized he’d only made matters worse.
Each day that went by now with himself and Priscilla still at odds made Aaron more determined to settle their quarrel. He gave it no words, but there was a feeling that he had to get Pris to take him back before Jonathan left on his trip.
If Aaron had known last winter that his approval of the plan to purchase a bull would lead to the situation he now found himself in, he would have objected then. But arguing about whether or not Jonathan should make the trip was now impossible. What would Mary think if he raised objections? That he was afraid of what might happen if the two of them were left alone?
4
The fields of Moran lay at their blackest best, for the most part. The harrowing was nearly done, but the heavy drags had turned rocks up, seeking them out of their hiding spots and laying them bare and discovered above the ground, looking like blocks of salt on the peppery earth.
The tin bottom of the stone boat screeched along on the complaining soil, and with each “Hiyup!” the horses worked harder at their growing load. Jonathan did very little whistling during stone-picking. The only breath he could spare was for the whistle that escaped his pursed lips when he’d hoisted another stone up and dropped it onto the stone boat, the great reflex expulsion of breath seeming to lend him strength for handling the next stone.
It was Friday morning when Jonathan straightened and stretched his back, glancing sideways at Aaron. “We’re going over to Volence’s tonight. You coming along?” Jonathan wondered why Priscilla hadn’t come home with Aaron for breakfast last Sunday, as usual. He’d also noted that Aaron hadn’t been down the hill to her house for over a week. He guessed something was amiss.
But Aaron only answered, “I reckon so,” and stooped to pick up another stone. “It’ll do us all good to get away for a while.”
Abiding by local custom, Mary baked a cake to offer on this first visit to a family with a new baby. Also following local custom, Clem Volence went down to his cellar and brought up a quart of golden, homemade dandelion wine to treat the visitors. Between the cake and wine, the children, and the babble of excitement over the unexpected call, the coolness between Aaron and Pris went quite unnoticed. Newt monopolized Aaron’s lap once they were seated around the kitchen table. The child’s nonstop chatter was welcome, for it filled the chasm that gaped between Aaron and Pris whenever their eyes met. She had greeted him with a civil hello but made sure when they were all seated that her chair wasn’t next to his. Mary caught Priscilla’s quick retreat from Aaron’s gaze and looked for some sign of reconciliation between the two of them, aware of its importance to her.
The baby was awake, and Cora brought him into the kitchen, taking him straight to Mary with great sisterly pride.
“You wanna hold him, Mary?”
Cora bent near Mary’s shoulder to show off the prize.
“I’d love to if it’s all right with your mama.”
“’Course it is,” Agnes assured her with a laugh. “By the time you have your fifth one, you’re just too glad to have someone else do the holding for a change,” she added.
The warm shape felt foreign. The baby was quiet, though awake.
“What’s his name?” she asked.
“James,” Newt said importantly, “but we’re gonna call him Jimmy while he’s little.”
The baby’s eyelids were nearly transparent, and he had no brows at all. There were tiny white newborn dots on his nose, and his mouth with its slightly swollen upper lip sometimes sucked at nothing.
“Ain’t he cute?” Newt asked, and though she wasn’t too sure about it, Mary answered, “He’s plumb beautiful, Newt. Anyone can see that.”
She hadn’t any of the knack for talking inanities to an infant and would have felt foolish trying it in front of all these people. But the longer she held Jimmy, the nicer he felt. He was a good size in her arm, and the little lumps and bumps of his tiny body kind of fit as they lay against her. He had an uncommonly good smell about him, not unlike the barn cats after they had drunk fresh milk. He moved his feet inside the blankets, and the li
ttle movement felt right against her stomach. Sometimes the tip of his tongue peeked through rosy lips, and she marveled at the smallness of it, just as she did at his tiny fingernails and earlobes.
As always, the men were talking weather, crops, and planting—always foremost in their minds at this time of year. The remainder of April and May would be spent putting the crops in, the last of May always an unspoken deadline they aimed for.
“I don’t know if I’ll be done by the end of May this year,” Jonathan said, “but if I’m not, Mary said she’d give Aaron a hand getting in the last of the seed corn. I’m taking the train down to Minneapolis in the last part of May, to the Cattle Exposition.”
Mary looked up. With a sudden shock she realized what he was talking about. The Cattle Exposition…the Black Angus…but it was long ago when they’d talked about it. She hadn’t given it a thought for some time. Now she felt a tremor run through her.
He meant to leave her and Aaron alone. Why hadn’t Jonathan said anything more about this to her? Why was he telling everyone here about his plans to make the trip, sealing them with finality by doing so?
Mary met Aaron’s eyes briefly across the table, and he realized that Jonathan had not spoken to her about this since they’d all talked it over together last winter. His puckered brows clearly told Mary that Aaron was aware of Jonathan’s plans and that they didn’t rest well with him.
The baby had fallen asleep, and Pris took him off to his bed but returned from upstairs to the living room and began playing the organ. It was getting late, and Aaron knew they’d soon be leaving. If he wanted to talk to her, this was his chance. When he got up to leave the kitchen Newt would have followed him, but Agnes sent him packing upstairs to get ready for bed. Aaron was grateful.
Priscilla had her back to Aaron when he came into the living room. He came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, but she continued to play, pumping the foot pedals and creating a gusty sound that wafted louder than his voice, giving them a sort of privacy.
“We have to talk,” he said to her back.
“Uh-uh,” was all she said.
“How long are you going to keep this up?”
“I don’t want to talk to you or see you anymore,” she said.
“Turn around and look at me when you say that,” he challenged her.
“It would be the same, looking at you or not.”
He swung her by the shoulders until she spun around on the revolving organ stool to face him. Her hands had slid across the keys, and the discordant notes swooned to a telling silence as the bellows lost air. The voices in the kitchen waned momentarily. Then the sound of scraping chairs told Aaron they were preparing to leave.
He lowered his voice. “Will you come outside so we can talk this over like two adults?”
“No. I have to help Mama put the kids to bed.”
“Okay, have it your way,” Aaron conceded. “But I’ll come down and get you for the dance tomorrow night.”
“I’m going with Willy,” she said.
“Next Saturday, then.”
“Don’t waste your time, Aaron,” she said dryly.
“Okay, have it your way for now.” Then he went to join the others at the door and say his goodnights to Clem and Agnes.
The ride home was uncomfortable. While the trap seated two comfortably, it crowded three. Aaron sat nearly atilt in his corner, stretching an arm along the back of the seat to widen the space where Mary sat wedged. Although her left shoulder found space behind Jonathan, her right nested warmly against Aaron. His leg bolstered hers, and his armpit contoured her shoulder. In days past they’d ridden this way unaware of crowded limbs. That was no longer true.
In bed later, sealed inside the dark, Mary said to Jonathan, “I didn’t know you planned to go to the Cattle Exposition.”
“We talked about buying the bull last winter,” he reminded her.
“Yes, but that was…before.”
“You mean you don’t want me to buy one now?”
“’Course I do, but do you have to go to Minneapolis to do it?”
“If I’m to get the purebred I want for starting the herd, then yes.”
“I can see you’re dead set on going.”
“Aha.”
“When?”
“In five weeks.”
She knew how badly he wanted to buy his first bull, but she knew, too, that the trip fell in with his other thoughts. She couldn’t let him go along assuming everything would go as planned while he was gone.
“I know you want that bull terribly bad, Jonathan, and what I said last winter I’ll stick by. I’ll help Aaron with the corn if it’s not done yet—so you can go—but don’t expect to come home and find me changed, because I won’t be.”
His voice came lightly from his pillow. “That’s fine, Mary.” But his tone implied, “We’ll wait and see.”
She felt the spinning of events whirling on in spite of her, like when she was a child trying again and again to catch the spinning box-elder seeds that spiraled down toward her outstretched hands. She’d been told it was lucky to catch the seeds before they touched the ground, but always just before they fluttered into her grasp they reeled out of reach. Events now whirled around her, leaving her unfavored and luckless. She’d thought Jonathan had accepted her and Aaron’s refusal, and now he’d come up with this other ploy to nudge his notion into reality. She was convinced now that his going served his other purpose. Divining that, Mary knew she must now try to reconcile her differences with him, take a step toward a normal relationship in light of his coming trip. It was she who’d turned him away in the first place, she who must turn toward him again.
“Jonathan, I’m sorry I turned you away,” she said.
She needed to say no more, for the dandelion wine had warmed him and he rolled onto his side and took her in his arms. But before kissing her, he said, “I reckon you had reason.”
His lovemaking was familiar, for its pattern never changed. When he reached for her, she was there in her own familiar way, and when he rolled her onto her back and entered her, there was a comfortableness that seven years had created. But when he lay spent, they knew there were other things between them tonight.
In her there was a desperation, a clutching effort to settle this tension among the three of them.
And for Jonathan there was a kind of resurging hope.
The trip, the buying of the bull became a panacea for Jonathan. The bull symbolized all he hoped to accomplish, and he spent elated hours imagining herds of hornless Black Angus cattle roaming over the land, all because he had had the foresight to buy one small bull.
Ah, but that bull would be something.
Planting the small grains of wheat, oats, and barley during the following weeks, he contented himself with dreaming of the Angus. Aaron, pouring seed to fill the grain drill, wished that his brother would cease whistling for just one day, but Jonathan leaned to his work, whistling his way through the seeding. Aaron worked beside him while they finished the wheat planting and moved to the oats. They worked long days, staying in the fields to use even the last dusk-lit hour for sowing. But after the long hours with the sun in their eyes in one direction and the dust in their mouths in the other, evening chores waited for them. Jonathan seemed unaffected by the hours of arduous labor, but while milking at the end of the day, Aaron’s hands ached, the winter-softened skin burned from the leather reins he’d pulled all day. It didn’t warm him toward his brother any, either. Aaron continued to simmer at Jonathan’s satisfied air.
Full spring rounded on them suddenly, bringing all her best out of hiding: bloodroots, Indian turnips, wild arbutus, and more. Dandelions with bitter leaves needed sweetening into wine, wild asparagus appeared on the dinner table, watercress made its once-a-year appearance in spring runnels, and comfrey needed gathering for next winter’s medicinal brews. Even the ditches burst into an array of color as Indian tobacco, pennyroyal, and crowfoot blossomed again. The arborvitae berried, eve
rgreens candled, oaks spoke after their long silence, elms blossomed and seeded, and birches popped their bark. Liverwort, trillium, and wake-robins appeared in the woods while the garden perennials shook their winter-flattened hair.
And everywhere the animals nested. Squirrels outspokenly hurried every which way. Gophers disappeared into the ground with bits of grass in their mouths. Swollen garter snakes and toads frequented the garden. The paired wrens returned to their house in the low-branched mountain ash. The barn cats had a litter somewhere, the female reappearing thin and slack, her underbelly swaying as she walked. Hens clucked in their nests, stubbornly refusing to lay again until they felt something alive move beneath them. The geese were laying and would continue as long as their eggs were taken. Mary collected them each day and kept them carefully until there were the fifty she wanted for a summer flock, when she would put them under the “clucks” and let them have their way, but meanwhile she turned the goose eggs over daily, sprinkling them with water as the mother goose would have done with her bill.
Nature reaffirmed itself in celebration. And the three who lived and worked so closely with it felt its urgency.
But in mid-May, Mary’s monthly flow started. She returned to the house and tore clean rags, stubbornly refusing to let it bother her. At midday she tore more and washed those from morning, taking them to spread on the sumac bushes in the woods behind the outhouse. She never hung them on the clothesline between the birches in the yard, for she thought they’d be indelicate strung out there, the stains never completely bleached clean. So they lay on the sumacs, covering the scarlet buds that were promising to bear leaf soon, she still stubbornly saying to herself, “I don’t care, and I hope Jonathan knows it!”
But the thought came unbidden: two weeks from now when he goes off to Minneapolis, it’ll be the time of the month Doc Haymes and I believe in…the time he says a woman conceives…
She’d never been able to convince Jonathan to accept what Doc Haymes held to be true. But just like the animals, there were changes in her body then, swellings and flowing, tenderness and sensitivity that it lacked at other times. She could never say to Jonathan, “See, feel, I’m different now,” for he had always refused to believe the theory. But he knew darned well that she held it as true, and she wondered if he would notice those rags out there on the sumacs and figure ahead.