The night of the first dance, she counted: four times he danced with Isabelle Lawler. Four times! She kept no tally on the other women, so didn’t realize he’d danced equally as many times with Clara, and with Nissa, and with plenty of others. She only knew that each time he took the cook onto the floor her own sense of inadequacy redoubled and she felt the embarrassing urge to cry. She was standing on the sidelines watching them when Clara found her.
“Whew! It’s warm in here.”
“Teddy’s plenty warm — I can see that. Seems to be warming up more by the minute,” she noted caustically.
Clara glanced at the dancing couple, then back at Linnea. “Isabelle? Oh, honey, don’t be silly. He’s just dancing with her, that’s all.”
“This is the fourth time.”
“So what? That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Tell me what he sees in her, will you? Look at her. With those teeth she could eat corn through a picket fence, and that hair looks like somebody set fire to a haystack. But he’s smiled more since she got here than he has in the last two months “
“He’s always happy during threshing. All the men are.”
“Sure. So how many times did Trigg dance with her? Or Lars?”
“Linnea, you’re overreacting. Teddy just loves to dance, that’s all, and he knows you tire easily now.”
Though Clara’s observation was meant to console Linnea, it only made her gloomier. “I feel like marching out there and telling that orange-headed tub of lard to find her own damn man and leave mine alone!”
“Well, if it’d make you feel better, why don’t you do it?”
Linnea glanced at Clara to find her wearing a gamine grin and couldn’t resist grinning back.
“Oh sure, and start everybody for forty miles around talking?”
“She’s been coming here for — golly, what is it? — five years? Seven? I don’t even remember anymore. Anyway, if there was something between them, don’t you think people would have been talking long before this?”
Linnea’s ruffled feathers were smoothed momentarily, but later that night, when Theodore flopped into bed beside her, she immediately sensed a difference in him. He rolled to his side facing her and lay a wrist over her hip.
“Come here,” he whispered.
“Teddy, we can’t—”
“I know,” he returned, bracing on an elbow to kiss her, kneading her hip. He’d been drinking beer and the flavor of it lingered on his tongue. He pulled her close. Her distended stomach came up against his, then he found her hand and brought it to his tumescence, sheathing himself with her fingers.
She realized he’d been aroused even before he hit the bed.
Hurt, she whispered, “Who brought this on?”
“What?”
“I said who brought this on — me or Isabelle Lawler?”
His hand paused. Even in the dark she sensed him bristling. “Isabelle Lawler? Now what’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve been bundling up on your own side of the bed for weeks, and now after dancing with her all night long you come to me hard as a fresh-dug rutabaga and expect me to take care of it for you? How dare you, Theodore Westgaard!”
She thrust his flesh away as if it were distasteful and flopped onto her back. He, too, rolled to his back angrily.
“Isabelle Lawler hasn’t got a thing to do with this.”
“Oh, hasn’t she?”
“Come on, Linnea, all I did was dance with her.”
“Four times. Four times, Theodore!”
He plumped his pillow and flounced over, presenting his spine. “Pregnant women,” he mumbled disgustedly.
She grabbed his arm and tried to yank him onto his back again with little success. “Don’t you ‘pregnant woman’ me, Teddy, not after you made me this way! And not after you’ve been walking around here smiling all week like some... some Hindu who just got his thirteenth wife!”
“Thirteenth... ” Head off the pillow, he looked back over his shoulder, shrugged his arm free, then settled down with his back to her again. “Go to sleep, Linnea. You’ve got no reason to be jealous. You’re just not feeling yourself these days.”
This time she punched him on the arm. “Don’t you go—”
“Ow!”
“—playing possum with me, Theodore Westgaard. Roll over here, because we’re going to have this out! Now, don’t tell me there’s nothing between you and Isabelle Lawler, because I don’t believe it!”
He folded his hands beneath his head, glared at the ceiling in the dark, and said nothing.
“Now tell me!” she insisted, sitting up beside him.
“Tell you what?”
“What there is between you and that woman?”
“I told you, there’s nothing.”
“But there was, wasn’t there?”
“Linnea, you’re imagining things.”
“Don’t treat me like a child!”
“Then don’t act like one! I said there’s nothing and I meant it.”
“I can see the way she likes to hang around you. And you’re the only one she never cusses with. And tonight before the dance you... you put on bay rum and you were humming.”
“I put on bay rum before every dance.”
Did he? She’d never watched him get ready for a dance before. She flounced onto her back and tucked the bedclothes beneath her arms. Picking at a knot of yarn on the quilt, staring at the moonlight on the opposite wall, she steeled herself to accept whatever he might say. Her voice became softer.
“You can tell me, Teddy, and I promise I won’t get mad. I’m your wife. I’ve got a right to know.”
“Linnea, why do you keep on this way?”
“Because, you know you were the first one for me.”
“You already know there was Melinda.”
“That’s different. She was your wife.”
He pondered silently for some time before going on. “And suppose it was true. Suppose there was a whole string of other women. What good would it do for you to know it now?”
She turned her head to face him and spoke sincerely. “There shouldn’t be secrets between husbands and wives.”
“Everybody’s got a right to their own secrets.”
She was hurt at the thought that there were things he didn’t share with her. She shared everything with him.
“What was there between you and Isabelle?” she prodded.
“Linnea, drop it.”
“I can’t. I wish I could, but I can’t.”
He lay silently a long time, ran a hand through his hair, and wedged it behind his neck, emitting a long sigh.
“All right. Every year at threshing time I saw Isabelle in her wagon, after bedtime.”
The jealousy Linnea had felt before became pallid beside this gargantuan lump in her chest. “You were... lovers?”
He drew a deep breath, let it out slowly, and closed his eyes. “Yes.”
Now that the truth was out, she wished she’d left sleeping dogs lie, but some perverse instinct forced her to ask further questions. “This year?”
“No, what do you think—”
“Last year then?”
A long silence, then, “Yes.”
Rage burned through her. “But that was after you met me!”
“Yes.” He braced up on one elbow, looking down into her face. “And we couldn’t look at each other without snapping. And I thought you were too young for me, and that it was indecent to have stirrings about my son’s school teacher. And I thought you couldn’t stand my guts, Linnea.”
He tried to touch her but she jerked away. “Oh, how could you!”
Typical woman, he thought, says she won’t get mad, then bristles like a hedgehog. “It’s been fifteen years since Melinda ran away. Did you think there’d be nobody in all that time?”
“But she’s... she’s fat and... and uncouth and—”
“You don’t know anything about her, so don’t go casting stones,” he returned tightl
y.
“But how could you bring her back here this year and parade her under my nose.”
“Parade her! I’m not parading her!”
“And what else are you doing right under my nose?”
“If you’re insinuating—”
“Coming to bed hornier than a two-peckered goat when you and I haven’t been able to make love for nearly a month. What am I supposed to think?”
“If you’d stop acting like a child, you’d realize that no man can go fifteen years without something... someone.”
“Child! Now I’m a child!”
“Well, you act like one!”
“So go to Isabelle.” Tossing the covers back, Linnea leaped from the bed. “With her build and her language, nobody’d ever mistake her for a child, would they?”
He sat straight up, jabbed a finger at the spot she’d left. “I don’t want Isabelle, now will you get back in this bed?”
“I wouldn’t get back in that bed if my clothes were on fire and it was made of water!”
“Lower your voice. Ma’s not deaf, you know.”
“And you wouldn’t want her to know about your little peccadilloes, would you?” she returned sarcastically.
He didn’t know what “peccadilloes” meant and it made him all the angrier. He braced his elbows on his updrawn knees and ran both hands through his hair. “I should’ve known better than to tell you. I should’ve known you couldn’t handle it. You’re just too damn young to understand that everything in life isn’t black and white. Isabelle and I weren’t hurting anybody. She was alone. I was alone. We gave each other what we needed. Can you understand that?”
“I want that woman out of here tomorrow, do you hear?”
“And who’s gonna feed the threshers? You, when you’re eight months pregnant and can hardly make it to the end of a dancer’
“I don’t care who does it, but it better not be Isabelle Lawler!”
“Linnea, come back here — where you going?”
At the door she paused only long enough to fling back, “I’m going to my old room!”
“You are not! You’re my wife and you’ll sleep in my bed!”
“You can expect me back in it when Isabelle Lawler disappears!”
When she was gone he sat staring at the black hole of the doorway, wondering how any woman could be so perverse. First she says she won’t get mad, then she yells loud enough to wake the dead — much less, Ma — and marches off as if she expects him to go whimpering after her and apologize. Well, she’d wait till hell froze over cause he didn’t have anything to apologize for! Last year had nothing to do with this year, and this year all he’d done with Isabelle was dance. And how could she think he’d be so faithless as to take Isabelle to bed just because he had to do without from his pregnant wife for a couple months?
Cut to the quick, Theodore lay on his back and stewed.
Just who did she think she was, that little snip, to dictate orders? Isabelle was a damn fine cook, and without her they’d be in a pretty pickle. She’d cook till the end of the threshing season, and if Linnea didn’t like it, she could go right on bunking upstairs! He’d sleep better with her up there anyway; all she did all night long was make trips to the commode and wake him up.
Lord God... pregnant women, he thought again, flopping onto his side. Well, never again! He was too old to be going through this. This one baby and that was it... the end! And he hoped to high heaven when she had it she’d get over this testiness and life would get back to normal.
In the morning Nissa didn’t say a word, though she most certainly must’ve heard the ruckus through the wall last night, and she knew Linnea had slept upstairs.
The three convened in the kitchen for breakfast.
“Fine mornin’,” Nissa offered to no one in particular.
Nobody said a word.
“Ain’t it?” she snapped, eyeing Linnea over the tops of her glasses.
“Yes... yes, it’s a fine morning.”
Theodore crossed the room with the milk pails, eyeing his wife silently.
“Need me a couple more pieces o’ coal for the fire. Reckon I’ll go out and get ‘em, get me a sniff of this morning air.”
When the old woman was gone, taking the half-full coal hod with her, he studied Linnea a little closer. He could tell she’d been crying last night. “Mornin’,” he said.
“Morning.” She refused to look at him.
“How’d you sleep?”
“Like a baby.”
“Good. Me, too.” It was a lie; he’d slept hardly at all without her beside him. His palms were damp. He wiped one on his thigh, intending to reach out and touch her arm, but before he could she spun away — ” Excuse me. I have to comb my hair” — and flounced into the bedroom without once glancing his way.
All right, you stubborn little cuss, have it your way. It’ll get colder than an eskimo’s outhouse in that room before long and you’ll come back wanting to snuggle. Meantime, the cook stays!
And she did.
Isabelle stayed through the entire week while Linnea refused to look at or speak to Theodore, unless he spoke to her first. By Saturday night the tension in the house was horrendous. Nissa was the only one getting a decent night’s sleep. The other two managed only enough to get by, and the strain was showing in their faces.
There was a barn dance at their place Saturday night, and Teddy and Linnea spent the first hour laughing and dancing with everybody in the place but each other. Teddy slugged down two beers, eyeing her over the beer glass most of the time, thinking how pretty she looked pregnant. Some women got dowdy and washed-out looking when they were carrying babies. Not his wife. She glowed like someone had lit a candle inside her cheeks. He screwed up his courage to cross the hayloft and ask her to dance, and after several minutes, made his move. Before he reached her, his palms were sweating again.
With feined jocularity, he paused beside her, hooked his thumbs in his waistband and raised one eyebrow. “So what do you say, you wanna dance?”
She flicked him a glance of unadulterated feline haughtiness, shifted it pointedly to Isabelle Lawler, and replied, “No, thank you.” Then, with a slight lift of her nose, she turned away.
So he danced with Isabelle. And one hell of a lot more than four times!
Linnea tried not to watch them. But Teddy was the best darn dancer in the county, and every corpuscle in her body was bulging with jealousy. Thankfully, Nissa offered an escape.
“Think I overdid it with the homemade wine,” she said. “Either that or the spinning or both, but I feel a little dizzy. Would you walk me to the house, Linnea?”
Naturally, Linnea complied. Halfway there, Nissa took up reminiscing in an offhand manner, “I ‘member once when my man brung home this new rag rug. I says to him, what you wanna go buy a rug for when I can make ‘em myself? What you wanna waste your money on a thing like that for? He smiles and says he thought it’d be nice one time, me not having to make a rug, but just flop it down on the floor already warped, woofed, and tied. But me, I got mad at him cause one o’ the boys — I can’t remember which one — was near out of his shoes. Should’ve got new boots for the boy, I says, instead of throwin’ your money away on rag rugs. He said there was a widow woman with two young ones peddling her rugs in town that day and he thought it’d help her out if he bought that rug.” Nissa sniffed once. “Me, well, I asks, what you doin’ talkin’ to widow women, and he says I might be his wife, but that don’t give me the right to tell him who he can and can’t talk to. So I asks who this widow woman was, and he tells me, and I recall these several times we was all at a barn-raising together and how he’d talked and laughed with her some, and my hackles got up and before you know it I asks how she’s gettin’ on without her husband, and where she’s livin’ now. And, by Jove, if he can’t answer every one of my questions. And pretty soon I’m telling him I don’t want his blame rag rug, not if he got it from her! As I recall, we didn’t speak to one another for over a wee
k that time. Rag rug laid on the floor and I refused to put a foot onto it, and he refused to pick it up and take it away.
“Then one day I went to town and happened to run into her on the street. She’d got tuberculosis and coughed all the time and was nothin’ but a bag of bones, and when she saw me she says how grateful she was that my man bought that rug from her, and how one of her little ones had needed a pair of boots so bad, and when she sold that rug, she’d been able to buy em.”
Linnea and Nissa had reached the back door by this time, but the older woman stood on the steps a moment, looking up at the stars. “Learned a thing or two that time. Learned that a man’s heart can get broke if he’s accused when he ain’t guilty, Learned that some men got hearts o’ gold, and gold, it don’t tarnish. But gold... well, it’s soft. It dents easy. Woman’s got to be careful not to put too many dents in a heart like that.” Nissa chortled softly to herself, turned toward the door, and opened it but hesitated a moment before stepping inside. “As I recall, the night I finally told him I was sorry, he laid me down on that rag rug on the floor and put a couple rug burns on m’ hind quarters... hmm... still got that old rug around here someplace. In a trunk, I think, with my wedding dress and a watch fob I braided for him out of my own hair when I was sixteen years old.” She shook her head, touched her brow. “Land, lookin’ up like that makes a person dizzier than ever.” Without glancing back, she continued into the house. “Well, good night, child.”
Linnea was left with a lump in her throat and a thick feeling in her chest. She glanced toward the barn. The apricot lanternlight shone dimly through the windows. The distant strains of concertina and fiddle music drifted dimly through the night. Go to him, it seemed to say.
She glanced in the opposite direction. Nestled beside the caragana hedge the bulky form of the cook wagon hovered like a threatening shadow. The moon, like a half-slice of shaved cheese, threw its light across the yard while the night breeze played the dried seedpods of the caragana bushes like tiny drums. But it’s he who should be apologizing, they seemed to say. He’s the one who’s dancing with somebody else.