If Wishes Were Horses (8 page)

“Just forget it,” Latrice said. “There is nothin’ you can do about it, so it doesn’t matter now.’’

“It does matter! How I feel matters. That I’m so furious and the one person I should be screamin’ at is dead matters. That I cannot mourn my husband matters to me, whether or not it makes any sense. That I threw away all these years married to him matters. Can’t change any of it, but it damn well matters. My feelings matter!”

She was practically yelling and shaking so badly that Latrice took the cup from her hand.

“Get ahold of yourself,” Latrice said.

“Oh, I’m sure that will help a lot—to get hold of myself. Well maybe if I hadn’t been trying so hard to hold on to myself and be perfect for everyone for all these years, I might have let go of a losin’ proposition. And I suppose I do have hold of myself, because if I didn’t, I’d be out there diggin’ Roy up and kickin’ his butt all over the damn cemetery!”

Latrice stared at her with a pained expression.

“I’m sorry,” Etta said, shaking her head and turning away. She felt so sorry for her entire life.

Latrice said, “Come on, I’ll help you to bed.”

“Don’t.” Etta pulled away. “You can’t fix this for me, Latrice. You’ve always tried to fix things for me, but this time you just can’t. Please leave me. I need to be alone.”

Outside the door, Latrice hovered, listening. She was afraid to leave Etta alone. This was the first time that Etta had ever turned away from her, and she didn’t know how to react.

Not seeing anything else to do, however, Latrice went downstairs and made a gin and tonic from Roy Rivers’s liquor cabinet, took it into the kitchen and sat in her rocker, drinking and praying to God for Etta and damning Roy Rivers to hell, and because of this having to pray for her own soul.

From the first moment she had laid eyes on Roy Rivers, Latrice had done all she could to dissuade Etta from falling into his arms. She had dug in her heels and fought, the same way a woman fights wrinkles and age spots, knowing perfectly well all the time that the war will not be won.

Oh, men had always flitted around Etta, and Latrice had had to be very vigilant. Etta had been so hungry for love and tenderhearted and pretty that she had been an accident just waiting to happen. From the time she reached fourteen, she had all the time been bringing home any male who looked hang-dogged at her. They came after her like panting puppies, and Etta fell in love with them all.

Thankfully, however, Etta had been possessed of enough sense not to fall in bed with them—and she’d had Latrice to be vigilant, too.

But then Etta had met Roy Rivers. Roy Rivers had not been the first in Etta’s heart, but he had been the first to get into her pants. That boy had been able to charm the bees right away from their honey.

Latrice had refused to go to the wedding, and when the two had returned from their honeymoon (in Las Vegas, of course, where Roy Rivers could gamble his heart out), she had stubbornly held off coming over to the Rivers house for an entire month. She knew she was going to break down and go eventually, and she even began to haul home boxes in preparation for packing the things in the little white cracker box of a cottage she and Etta had shared, just the two of them since Etta’s mother had died and her daddy had run off. But she was holding out until Etta summoned her, which she knew Etta would do sooner or later.

When Etta had called, it had been in a distressed state, crying because she had miscarried the child she had held in her womb even as she married. Upon hearing that news, and the total despair in Etta’s voice, Latrice had summoned her cousin Freddy the cabdriver and headed for the Rivers farm. Passing by a grocery, she’d had Freddy stop so that she could shop for supper that evening. She figured she might as well carve her place into the situation immediately. Besides, she knew good and well Etta had not had a decent meal since her wedding day, because Etta was a poor cook.

In the Rivers’s big shiny kitchen (which she instantly coveted but would not admit) with Etta safe and secure in the rocking chair, Latrice whipped up the meal—lean ham slices and collards and new potatoes and cornbread, with sweetened peaches and milk for desert.

Watching him ladle big scoops of butter onto his bread and insist on cream for his peaches, even in the face of his wife who could barely eat, Latrice saw the truth of it all in his florid face and smooth grin—Roy Rivers wanted Etta, and he intended to have her in the way of a grasping man who has always gone after and gotten his exact desire and will. Latrice was ashamed that she had failed in her duty to protect Etta and educate her against such men as this.

Over after-supper coffee, Roy Rivers said to her, “You know you have to come here to live, Latrice.” He used his smoothest voice and smile as he struck a match to light up a cigar. “I’ll give you your own room and an allowance.”

“I want my own bathroom, too,” she said, figuring she might as well make the best of this situation.

“I’ll have it built,” he said.

Later he turned it into a brag, getting a kick out of telling people, “My wife came with her own nanny.”

Roy Rivers had tried to charm Latrice, and when that hadn’t worked, he had tried to buy her goodwill with perfume, a new Westinghouse clothes washer and dryer, and a radio powerful enough to pick up, on good nights, Chicago to the north and the Border to the south, just for her, because he knew that in alienating her he ran the risk of displeasing Etta, and also because Roy Rivers really had trouble with a person not liking him.

In his way, Latrice had to concede, he had been as needy as Etta. She supposed she at times had felt sorry for him, but that was before he had died and left them in such a bind.

Latrice came awake to discover that morning was approaching and that she had slept all night in her rocker. She was stiff as a starched sheet and highly annoyed because sleeping in a chair seemed something that old people did, and she was not old—only forty-one.

After lighting the oven to take the chill off the kitchen, she plugged in the percolator out on the back porch. Glancing at the barn, she saw the cowboy’s pickup still showing in the entrance. She gazed at it for a long minute. She had an uneasy feeling about the cowboy. It seemed odd the way Roy died and then the cowboy had appeared. Seemed a portent of some kind. One thing Latrice knew, nothing in life was coincidence.

While the coffee perked, she went into the tiny bathroom built off her bedroom, bathed, and dressed in a long-sleeved navy-blue shirtwaist and arranged her hair in an artful wave above her forehead, securing the rest in a roll at the back of her neck. Strands of gray had begun to show in her glossy dark hair at her temples. High cheekbones, a family trait, gave her face an ageless quality. Her mother had been handsome even as she died at thirty-eight from cancer eating her away. Latrice knew herself to be an attractive woman. Many a man had told her so and had wanted her. It was her choice not to have any of them. Having been sorely disappointed by the death of her fiancé, she guarded her heart and her freedom. Being tied to Etta was enough.

Latrice had always thought when Etta was well settled, she might then look around and chose a man. But that time had certainly not come with Roy Rivers. And the years got away.

She went out onto the porch to pour her cup of coffee.

The fresh morning air was damp and crisp. There came the sound of Obie Lee’s old pickup truck chugging down the lane from his house through the woods, backfiring like it always did. Obie Lee, a widower of some six years, worked forty acres of the Rivers land on shares and worked around the farm for cash money.

Latrice stood there and watched the battered truck stop at the barn. Obie, all six and half feet of him, unfolded himself from behind the wheel, flashed her a bright grin, and started straight for her. Obie Lee was in love with her.

“Mornin’, Miss Latrice . . . mighty fine day, ain’t it.” His lazy tone of voice could annoy Latrice no end.

“There’s not enough of it to tell yet,” she replied.

“Guess I’m anticipatin’,” he said. “I brought my thermos and thought I might fill it—your coffee bein’ so much better than mine.” He gazed up at her from the ground, his eyes like a red-bone pup’s, all warm and friendly and hopeful.

She said, “It’s here, I guess.” She felt sorry for being so sharp with him, yet irritated that he could be so pliable that he never let her sharpness bother him.

“And I thank you,” he said, opening his thermos. “How’s Miz Etta doin’?” he asked, his expression getting serious.

“She’s not awake yet, but when she does get awake, I imagine she’ll be havin’ a hard time.”

Obie nodded and said, “I imagine.”

Latrice thought that he might as well not have said anything at all, although she bit her tongue on this observation. She knew she was in a bad mood and being overly critical. He cast her another hopeful look—trying to wrangle an invitation to breakfast, she knew.

She said, “I have things to do,” and went back into the house.

At the door she sipped her coffee and watched Obie walk back to his truck, slumped over as if she had shot him.

Each morning she felt a silly expectancy in her chest, for what she didn’t know, but she would look for Obie, and he would come with his own hopefulness, and whatever it was she expected from him, he never did, because then he would go away, and she would feel disappointed.

When Johnny got himself awake enough to sit up, he saw a man off to the right, hefting a feed bag onto each shoulder and toting them past the pickup. The man was one tall drink of water Negro, a lean pole topped by a blue ball cap.

"Mornin’,” the man said to Johnny, as if he saw a stranger wake up in the back of a pickup truck in this very barn every day.

“Mornin’,” Johnny returned with equal politeness.

Realizing he was scratching his head, he stopped, not wanting the man to think he might have bugs. He knew he looked pretty poorly. He watched the tall man continue out and dump the sacks of feed in the back of his own truck.

Despite wanting to do better, Johnny sank back against his saddle. His head was pounding like a jackhammer. The tall man came three more times for feed sacks, while Johnny tried to get his head to quiet down. He listened to the red horse’s hooves gallop around in the corral, listened to the morning birds, listened to the tall man drive off in his truck. It gave a few good pops, which didn’t help Johnny’s head.

Suddenly he realized he smelled coffee. He thought he had to be dreaming, but he sat up again and saw a steaming enamel cup sitting on the edge of the tailgate. He had not heard the tall man’s footsteps, but he knew it had been him that had brought the coffee.

Johnny eased gingerly to the tailgate, dragging his boots along, stuck them on, and reached for the cup. He curled both hands around it, savoring the warmth and the aroma of the dark brew before tasting it. It was strong enough to open his eyes wide. Coffee warming and easing his pounding head, he sat and gazed at the house out across the yard. It looked silent.

After he drank the last drop, Johnny went and snaked the hose connected to the outside spigot into the barn, secured it over the partition of a stall, and took himself a shower. He cursed a couple of times, splashing on the icy well water and watching goose bumps grow and parts of him shrivel in the cold water and air.

Johnny had always been particular about keeping clean. He felt it came from his mother being somewhat of a fanatic about keeping him clean as a boy. He had been raised around a lot of women early on, his mother being a whore in a house in Fort Worth. All the women there had mothered him. They’d wanted so much for him, as mothers tend to do for their sons, and they had insisted he always be exceptionally presentable.

Even when down on his luck, Johnny always managed to find a way to wash himself, but sometimes washing his clothes was a bit more difficult. It did seem, though, that things always turned around for him just when all his clothes got dirty. He found either a job or a woman. As he slipped into his last clean shirt, he figured things were due to turn his way that very day.

Once more dressed and warmed by a flannel-lined denim jacket, shaved with cold water, teeth brushed and hair neatly combed, he made himself a cigarette and went out to the corrals. The gelding was running in the large one, head proud and tail flowing, as some horses were given to doing when the morning sun broke over the horizon.

Standing very still so as to not draw attention, Johnny watched the horse, watched his movements—the way he stretched his legs when running and the way he tucked his rear when he stopped short and turned. Johnny’s interest sharpened. When moving like that the gelding took on an amazing beauty, didn’t seem like the same horse at all.

Then the horse stopped and turned his head to Johnny. Once more seeming a little disjointed, he ambled over to the fence where Johnny stood and stuck his head over, sniffing at Johnny’s coat pocket containing the tobacco pouch.

“Well now, you little son-of-a-buck, you like tobacco, do ya?” Johnny took out some tobacco and fed it to him. A lot of horses liked tobacco.

Johnny was standing there at the fence when the tall Negro man returned in his pickup, the black truck chugging and popping up the pasture road that curved from around some trees. Johnny had halfway been waiting for him—or for some indication what to do next.

The tall man stopped his truck in front of the barn, got out, and said good morning again. “Well, you look like you might just live now.”

“Thanks to you. It was touch and go, I admit. Whiskey provided comfort last night and near death this mornin’.”

“Figured. I’ve been there a time or two. I emptied my thermos while I was feedin’ the cattle, but there’s a percolator sittin’ over there on the porch, and Miss Latrice likely has made fresh. She usually does.”

He took the lid to his thermos and Johnny’s cup over to the back porch and returned with both steaming. He was perhaps past fifty. It was hard to tell. He wore a tattered baseball cap with a big gold M on it, and he was sort of like a clothed skeleton walking, all his bones attached by strings. The hand that held out Johnny’s cup of coffee was large and strong and callused.