A Good Marriage (23 page)

“Never mind them,” I said, “
I
won’t let you.”

He looked at me from wounded, streaming eyes. “Why not?”

I thought:
You saw what it came to between your mother and me and you even have to ask?
But what I said was, “She’s 15 years old, and you won’t even be that for another two weeks.”

“But we love each other!”

O, that loonlike cry. That milksop hoot. My hands were clenched on the legs of my overalls, and I had to force them open and flat. Getting angry would serve no purpose. A boy needed a mother to discuss a thing like this with, but his was sitting at the bottom of a filled-in well, no doubt attended by a retinue of dead rats.

“I know you do, Henry—”

“
Hank!
And others get married that young!”

Once they had; not so much since the century turned and the frontiers closed. But this I didn’t say. What I said was that I had no money to give them a start. Maybe by ’25, if crops and prices stayed good, but now there was nothing. And with a baby on the way—

“There
would
be enough!” he said. “If you hadn’t been such a bugger about that hundred acres, there’d be
plenty
!
She
would’ve given me some of it! And
she
wouldn’t have talked to me this way!”

At first I was too shocked to say anything. It had been six weeks or more since Arlette’s name—or even the vague pronounal alias
she
—had passed between us.

He was looking at me defiantly. And then, far down our stub of road, I saw Harlan Cotterie on
his way. I had always considered him my friend, but a daughter who turns up pregnant has a way of changing such things.

“No, she wouldn’t have talked to you this way,” I agreed, and made myself look him straight in the eye. “She would have talked to you worse. And laughed, likely as not. If you search your heart, Son, you’ll know it.”

“No!”

“Your mother called Shannon a little baggage, and then told you to keep your willy in your pants. It was her last advice, and although it was as crude and hurtful as most of what she had to say, you should have followed it.”

Henry’s anger collapsed. “It was only after that . . . after that night . . . that we . . . Shan didn’t want to, but I talked her into it. And once we started, she liked it as much as I did. Once we started, she asked for it.” He said that with a strange, half-sick pride, then shook his head wearily. “Now that hundred acres just sits there sprouting weeds, and I’m in Dutch. If Momma was here, she’d help me fix it. Money fixes everything, that’s what
he
says.” Henry nodded at the approaching ball of dust.

“If you don’t remember how tight your momma was with a dollar, then you forget too fast for your own good,” I said. “And if you’ve forgotten how she slapped you across the mouth that time—”

“I ain’t,” he said sullenly. Then, more sullenly still: “I thought you’d help me.”

“I mean to try. Right now I want you to make
yourself scarce. You being here when Shannon’s father turns up would be like waving a red rag in front of a bull. Let me see where we are—and how he is—and I may call you out on the porch.” I took his wrist. “I’m going to do my best for you, Son.”

He pulled his wrist out of my grasp. “You better.”

He went into the house, and just before Harlan pulled up in his new car (a Nash as green and gleaming under its coating of dust as a bottlefly’s back), I heard the screen door slam out back.

The Nash chugged, backfired, and died. Harlan got out, took off his duster, folded it, and laid it on the seat. He’d worn the duster because he was dressed for the occasion: white shirt, string tie, good Sunday pants held up by a belt with a silver buckle. He hitched at that, getting the pants set the way he wanted them just below his tidy little paunch. He’d always been good to me, and I’d always considered us not just friends but good friends, yet in that moment I hated him. Not because he’d come to tax me about my son; God knows I would have done the same, if our positions had been reversed. No, it was the brand-new shiny green Nash. It was the silver belt buckle made in the shape of a dolphin. It was the new silo, painted bright red, and the indoor plumbing. Most of all it was the plain-faced, biddable wife he’d left back at his farm, no doubt making supper in spite of her worry. The wife whose sweetly given reply in the face of any problem would be,
Whatever you think is best, dear.
Women, take note: a wife like that never needs to
fear bubbling away the last of her life through a cut throat.

He strode to the porch steps. I stood and held out my hand, waiting to see if he’d take it or leave it. There was a hesitation while he considered the pros and cons, but in the end he gave it a brief squeeze before letting loose. “We’ve got a considerable problem here, Wilf,” he said.

“I know it. Henry just told me. Better late than never.”

“Better never at all,” he said grimly.

“Will you sit down?”

He considered this, too, before taking what had always been Arlette’s rocker. I knew he didn’t want to sit—a man who’s mad and upset doesn’t feel good about sitting—but he did, just the same.

“Would you want some iced tea? There’s no lemonade, Arlette was the lemonade expert, but—”

He waved me quiet with one pudgy hand. Pudgy but hard. Harlan was one of the richest farmers in Hemingford County, but he was no straw boss; when it came to haying or harvest, he was right out there with the hired help. “I want to get back before sundown. I don’t see worth a shit by those headlamps. My girl has got a bun in her oven, and I guess you know who did the damn cooking.”

“Would it help to say I’m sorry?”

“No.” His lips were pressed tight together, and I could see hot blood beating on both sides of his neck. “I’m madder than a hornet, and what makes it worse is that I’ve got no one to be mad
at
. I can’t be mad at the kids because they’re just kids,
although if she wasn’t with child, I’d turn Shannon over my knee and paddle her for not doing better when she
knew
better. She was raised better and churched better, too.”

I wanted to ask him if he was saying Henry was raised wrong. I kept my mouth shut instead, and let him say all the things he’d been fuming about on his drive over here. He’d thought up a speech, and once he said it, he might be easier to deal with.

“I’d like to blame Sallie for not seeing the girl’s condition sooner, but first-timers usually carry high, everyone knows that . . . and my God, you know the sort of dresses Shan wears. That’s not a new thing, either. She’s been wearing those granny-go-to-meetin’ dresses since she was 12 and started getting her . . .”

He held his pudgy hands out in front of his chest. I nodded.

“And I’d like to blame
you,
because it seems like you skipped that talk fathers usually have with sons.”
As if you’d know anything about raising sons,
I thought. “The one about how he’s got a pistol in his pants and he should keep the safety on.” A sob caught in his throat and he cried, “My . . . little . . .
girl
. . . is too young to be a mother!”

Of course there was blame for me Harlan didn’t know about. If I hadn’t put Henry in a situation where he was desperate for a woman’s love, Shannon might not be in the fix she was in. I also could have asked if Harlan had maybe saved a little blame for himself while he was busy sharing it out. But I held quiet. Quiet never came naturally
to me, but living with Arlette had given me plenty of practice.

“Only I can’t blame you, either, because your wife went and run off this spring, and it’s natural your attention would lapse at a time like that. So I went out back and chopped damn near half a cord of wood before I came over here, trying to get some of that mad out, and it must have worked. I shook your hand, didn’t I?”

The self-congratulation I heard in his voice made me itch to say,
Unless it was rape, I think it still takes two to tango
. But I just said, “Yes, you did,” and left it at that.

“Well, that brings us to what you’re going to do about it. You and that boy who sat at my table and ate the food my wife cooked for him.”

Some devil—the creature that comes into a fellow, I suppose, when the Conniving Man leaves—made me say, “Henry wants to marry her and give the baby a name.”

“That’s so God damned ridiculous I don’t want to hear it. I won’t say Henry doesn’t have a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out of—I know you’ve done right, Wilf, or as right as you can, but that’s the best I can say. These have been fat years, and you’re still only one step ahead of the bank. Where are you going to be when the years get lean again? And they always do. If you had the cash from that back hundred, then it might be different—cash cushions hard times, everyone knows that—but with Arlette gone, there they sit, like a constipated old maid on a chamberpot.”

For just a moment part of me tried to consider how things would have been if I had given in to Arlette about that fucking land, as I had about so many other things.
I’d be living in stink, that’s how it would have been. I would have had to dig out the old spring for the cows, because cows won’t drink from a brook that’s got blood and pigs’ guts floating in it
.

True. But I’d be living instead of just existing, Arlette would be living with me, and Henry wouldn’t be the sullen, anguished, difficult boy he had turned into. The boy who had gotten his friend since childhood into a peck of trouble.

“Well, what do you want to do?” I asked. “I doubt you made this trip with nothing in mind.”

He appeared not to have heard me. He was looking out across the fields to where his new silo stood on the horizon. His face was heavy and sad, but I’ve come too far and written too much to lie; that expression did not move me much. 1922 had been the worst year of my life, one where I’d turned into a man I no longer knew, and Harlan Cotterie was just another washout on a rocky and miserable stretch of road.

“She’s bright,” Harlan said. “Mrs. McReady at school says Shan’s the brightest pupil she’s taught in her whole career, and that stretches back almost 40 years. She’s good in English, and she’s even better in the maths, which Mrs. McReady says is rare in girls. She can do triggeronomy, Wilf. Did you know that? Mrs. McReady herself can’t do triggeronomy.”

No, I hadn’t known, but I knew how to say the
word. I felt, however, that this might not be the time to correct my neighbor’s pronunciation.

“Sallie wanted to send her to the normal school in Omaha. They’ve taken girls as well as boys since 1918, although no females have graduated so far.” He gave me a look that was hard to take: mingled disgust and hostility. “The females always want to get
married,
you see. And
have babies
. Join Eastern
Star
and sweep the God damned
floor
.”

He sighed.

“Shan could be the first. She has the skills and she has the brains. You didn’t know that, did you?”

No, in truth I had not. I had simply made an assumption—one of many that I now know to have been wrong—that she was farm wife material, and no more.

“She might even teach college. We planned to send her to that school as soon as she turned 17.”

Sallie planned, is what you mean,
I thought.
Left to your own devices, such a crazy idea never would have crossed your farmer’s mind
.

“Shan was willing, and the money was put aside. It was all arranged.” He turned to look at me, and I heard the tendons in his neck creak. “It’s
still
all arranged. But first—almost right away—she’s going to the St. Eusebia Catholic Home for Girls in Omaha. She doesn’t know it yet, but it’s going to happen. Sallie talked about sending her to Deland—Sal’s sister lives there—or to my aunt and uncle in Lyme Biska, but I don’t trust any of those people to carry through on what we’ve decided. Nor does a girl who causes this kind of
problem deserve to go to people she knows and loves.”

“What is it you’ve decided, Harl? Besides sending your daughter to some kind of an . . . I don’t know . . . orphanage?”

He bristled. “It’s not an orphanage. It’s a clean, wholesome, and busy place. So I’ve been told. I’ve been on the exchange, and all the reports I get are good ones. She’ll have chores, she’ll have her schooling, and in another four months she’ll have her baby. When that’s done, the kid will be given up for adoption. The sisters at St. Eusebia will see to that. Then she can come home, and in another year and a half she can go to teachers’ college, just like Sallie wants. And me, of course. Sallie and me.”

“What’s my part in this? I assume I must have one.”

“Are you smarting on me, Wilf? I know you’ve had a tough year, but I still won’t bear you smarting on me.”

“I’m not smarting on you, but you need to know you’re not the only one who’s mad and ashamed. Just tell me what you want, and maybe we can stay friends.”

The singularly cold little smile with which he greeted this—just a twitch of the lips and a momentary appearance of dimples at the corners of his mouth—said a great deal about how little hope he held out for
that
.

“I know you’re not rich, but you still need to step up and take your share of the responsibility. Her time at the home—the sisters call it prenatal
care—is going to cost me 300 dollars. Sister Camilla called it a donation when I talked to her on the phone, but I know a fee when I hear one.”

“If you’re going to ask me to split it with you—”

“I know you can’t lay your hands on 150 dollars, but you better be able to lay them on 75, because that’s what the tutor’s going to cost. The one who’s going to help her keep up with her lessons.”

“I can’t do that. Arlette cleaned me out when she left.” But for the first time I found myself wondering if she might’ve socked a little something away. That business about the 200 she was supposed to have taken when she ran off had been a pure lie, but even pin-and-ribbon money would help in this situation. I made a mental note to check the cupboards and the canisters in the kitchen.