April Love Story (8 page)

“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.

I
T 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 it 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.

I found myself in my little loft, wrapped in the quilt that was my only reliable friend, crying because I’d finally found the nicest boy anywhere, and he not only wasn’t interested in me—he was gone.

Lucas walked in about seven o’clock, with two young goslings in his arms. He’d gotten them free from a farmer miles away and had hitchhiked back to our farm. Hitchhiking isn’t easy at any time and apparently even fewer drivers are eager to pick up a kid in old jeans carrying baby geese. That, explained Lucas, to those of us who were interested, was what took so long.

Because baby anythings have to be kept very warm (we’d learned that the hard way), Lucas got a big cardboard box which he filled with wood shavings and all our hot water bottles. “Electric light bulb would be better,” he said meaningfully to our parents. But they didn’t rush out to get the house wired. “This way,” said Lucas, “I’ll have to get up at least twice during the night and refill these bottles.” I thought of interrupting our much-needed sleep to heat water on the woodstove and refill hot water bottles for two little geese.

“These,” said Lucas, looking each of us very carefully in the eye, “are going to be my pets. They are not for Easter dinner, right?”

“Right,” we chorused. I wanted to volunteer myself as a pet for Lucas, but from the way he looked at his goslings he had better things available.

Every night Lucas got up and refilled his hot water bottles and clucked to his goslings. It was quite depressing. You can hover over me, I thought. But he didn’t. “I’ll heat the water for you tonight,” I said. “You get some sleep.”

“Oh, would you?” he said eagerly. “That’s terrific, Marnie, thanks.”

I actually loved getting up twice that night to keep his old goslings toasty. I did it for three weeks, until Lucas decided the geese were tough enough to last without the extra heat. Every morning Lucas would say “thank you” and my heart would fall out of my rib cage during his smile, and every morning my father would say, “What are you doing, Lucas? Blackmailing the girl? You couldn’t get me up twice a night for a pair of geese we don’t even get to eat.” I would blush, Lucas would shrug, laughing, and we’d go off to school.

Unfortunately, Lucas’ legs were much longer than mine and we didn’t walk to the bus stop together. It seemed to me that when a girl kept your geese warm, you should at least walk her to the bus stop.

Lucas needs a book of etiquette, I thought. I shall write him one.
When warming geese
…

Lucas’ birthday came in March.

I taught myself how to knit, using a book Connie’s mother loaned me, and made a sweater for Lucas. I used a natural-colored wool from Scotland that took so much money from my baking income the sweater had to be perfect. I’d knit on the bus, during study hall, and in my loft.

It was a pullover with a thick turtleneck. Most of it was plain stockinette stitch, but there were three cable columns. I was scared of the cables at first, but Connie’s mother was right: Cables are fun and you feel so competent when they actually cross over and loop.

I had it done two days before his birthday.

“What a shame you got the gauge wrong and it won’t fit you after all,” said my mother, hugging me to comfort me. “You’re so nice to give it to Lucas, after all that work. Or you could give it to your father. His birthday is next month, he’s the same size, and he needs one, too.”

“Oh, I might as well give it to Lucas,” I said. “Get it out of the way.”

My father gave Lucas a Swiss Army knife with lots of little blades and things. Mother had made him a leather vest. Aunt Ellen got him thick, strong workboots. Uncle Bob had bought about twenty books at a church yard sale and also a new flashlight with lots of batteries. And then Lucas took up the last package. It didn’t say it was from me. It was just a fat, soft present wrapped in plain brown paper with a sagging yarn bow. He opened it eagerly. “Mother, it’s beautiful!” he exclaimed. “I love it.”

“I didn’t make it,” said Aunt Ellen.

“You didn’t make it?” he repeated. He looked totally bewildered.

“Marnie made it.”

“
Marnie made it
?” He stared at me as if he’d never seen me before. I tried to look appealing. Lucas looked back at the sweater, stuck a finger through a cable loop, and stared at me again. “I—I didn’t know you could knit,” he said at last.

I nodded mutely.

“Well, try it on, Lucas,” said his mother.

Lucas put it on. I held my breath. It fit beautiful. He couldn’t, I said to myself, have bought a nicer sweater anywhere. You can’t even see where I got the cables reversed and Connie’s mother ripped out fifty-two rows and got me started up again the right way. “Gee, thanks, Marnie,” said Lucas. He had a rather worried look on his face. Maybe the sweater was itchy.