Luna (11 page)

“It’ll have to be a lot hotter than that,” she said, pushing more wood into the fire.

“I have to admit, that stove does make better bread,” Selena said.

Rhea sighed, pulled out a chair and sat down at the table across from Selena.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” she asked.

“You mean, what do I want?” Selena grinned. “Nothing. I was lonesome, so I thought I’d drop over for tea.”

“Lonesome!” Rhea said, astonished.

“Well, I can’t go over to see Di anymore.”

“You’re lonesome now,” Rhea said, “what will you do when winter comes?”

“Oh, take a community college class, I guess.”

“It used to take us two hours with a team to get to Mallard. And when you got there, you weren’t anywhere,” Rhea said.

“We should get you to teach the young ones how to make bread.” Selena brightened at the thought. “That’d be a good class for this winter.”

“Somebody should teach them,” Rhea said. “Lord knows. Some of them had better be able to make bread the right way. It could be forgotten.”

Rhea rose again and poked the fire. She put another stick in, tested the oven again, and then set three of the loaves inside. The oven would hold only three loaves at a time and she had to keep shifting them because it was hotter at the back than at the front, and the left side browned better than the right.

Behind her Selena sighed.

“Things aren’t going so well for our community college committee,” she said. “They make us have a minimum enrollment before we can offer a class, and most of the women are only interested in crafts and things like that. If you offer something like history, you can’t get enough people to come.” Rhea sat down again and sipped her tea.

“I don’t know,” Selena said. “It seems like people out here are satisfied with their lives, and they don’t have much interest in the rest of the world.”

“Satisfied,” Rhea said. She thought of all the men and women who had come and then gone—neighbours, friends, relations. It seemed to her that the countryside had once been full of people, where now it was empty. “Except for Diane.”

“Except for Diane,” Selena said. “Now they’re taking away our post offices, our branch lines, killing off the few little stores we had left scattered around the country.”

“Soon there’ll be nothing left out here but grasshoppers and gophers,” Rhea said. They both laughed wryly, and sobered, looking out the window to the slowly sloping field of grass that rolled out to meet the sky. How it must have been, when there was no one here but the Indians and the animals, Selena thought.

“The bank took over Louise and Barclay’s place,” Selena said.

“No!” Rhea said, although everybody knew it was coming, she must have, too.

“Yeah, they had to move out. Helen says they’ve gone to Swift Current to live.”

“Poor Louise,” Selena said. “I wonder if they have enough equity to come out at least not owing.”

“Should,” Rhea said. “Barclay should have let Louise keep the cattle her dad gave her. They could fall back on cattle now. Everybody so anxious to modernize. Look where it gets them.”

“He hates cattle,” Selena said, pouring more tea into her cup. “It isn’t fair!” she said, banging down the teapot. “She worked so hard, she worked far harder than he did. She looked after the house, raised the kids and drove a tractor, picked rocks, harvest time she hauled grain—Kent even says she has a better business head than Bare, but he won’t listen to her.” Rhea lifted her head and her teacup to look hard at Selena.

“She isn’t the only one works harder than he does,” she said, mildly enough. “You never noticed that?” Selena thought a moment. Ruth did, everybody knew that, even Buck. And maybe Ella. Does she mean me? she suddenly wondered, glancing sharply at Rhea. No, not me. Kent’s one of the hardest workers around here, cattlemen all work harder than straight grain farmers any day of the week.

She thought of Caroline, little Caroline, as brown as a native, hard as nails. Running her own ranch back in the hills. She could ride and rope better than lots of the men. Broke broncs, even castrated studs herself, the men said. A head shorter than I am, she thought, and made an amused sound. Seeing Rhea looking questioningly at her, she said, “I was thinking of Caroline.” Rhea nodded. “She carries it too far,” Selena said. “I mean, it’s okay to work hard, but she’s just like a man.” She shook her
head. The men all stayed away from her, and when they talked about her, they laughed. Funny, she thought. “It seems like it’s okay to work hard, I mean, you have to work hard or people think you’re no good—look at all the things people say about Di, because she doesn’t help Tony farm—but if you work too hard …”

“Men don’t like women to try to take their place,” Rhea said.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” Selena said, thinking at the same time, who would want to live like a man, the way Caroline did. “Cutting horses, yuck,” she said.

But in her mind’s eye she was trying to imagine herself clumping into her own kitchen like Kent did, asking, supper ready? After we eat I’m going to doctor that heifer—no, I think I’ll ride for an hour or two first. Move the cattle out of that north field into Jake’s.

She laughed aloud. Rhea said, “That wind’s going to pick up. It’s going to rain.”

Selena glanced up at Rhea, then looked past her out the screen door. The sun was just as bright as it had been, the little patch of sky just as blue.

“Gosh, your snapdragons are pretty,” she said, deciding to ignore Rhea’s remark. “You’ve got such a green thumb.”

“Green thumb!” Rhea said disparagingly. “You just have to pay a little attention.”

“I do pay attention,” Selena said ruefully, “for all the good it does.”

“Give it time,” Rhea said, a note of finality in her voice.

The light was turning golden now. The wind was rising. They could hear it soughing through the grass far out across the prairie. It drew closer as they listened and before long it was whistling its way through Rhea’s garden, snapping the shrubs and rattling the corn. The snapdragons bumped their swollen heads against the door frame and a kingbird rose, chirping in protest, to swoop indignantly away.

“I’d better get going,” Selena said, jumping up. “If it’s actually going to rain I don’t want to get caught in it.” She stepped outside, holding her hair off her face in the wind, starting down the path to the gate. “Will you come over and help me butcher my chickens on Friday?” Rhea nodded,
holding the screen door against the wind. “See you,” Selena called over the whistle of the wind, her skirt pressed flat against her backside. Rhea turned inside.

As she shut the door she heard a booming clap of thunder. No rain, she told herself automatically, just thunder and lightning to kill a few cattle and split a few fenceposts. For a moment she thought the door she had just closed might open and Jasper would come stomping in, shaking himself like a dog, then peer out the kitchen window with his hands in his pockets, while she put the tea kettle on.

She went to the bedroom and looked out the window at the sky. Black thunderclouds were rising above the hills, rolling toward the house. As she watched, sheet lightning flooded the sky. Nothing but a windstorm, she muttered, a tinge of hope nonetheless colouring her prediction and she hurried around the small house closing windows.

In the kitchen she removed the first three loaves of bread, dumped them out of their pans onto the table, and put the last three in. This change in the weather wasn’t good for the bread. The kitchen had grown even darker. A few splatters of rain hit the window, and she went to it to look out, leaning against the sink. The wind was rattling the old barn. One of these days, she said out loud, it’ll blow down, and that’ll be the end of that.

Still, she liked storms. They thrilled her, brought her some kind of peculiar comfort, the evidence that life was not as simple and dull as it often seemed, that there were forces no one understood, sky gods maybe, and a power that could transform the prairie. A flash of lightning turned the prairie momentarily white and then black again.

She watched for another moment, then went to the living room, took the bouquet of sunflowers from the sealer, opened the front door into the wind, and threw them as hard as she could. They arced through the bluish, heavy air, caught by the wind, so that they went sailing, end over end, to disappear out into the storm.

It had begun to rain now. I hope Selena makes it home before it breaks, she thought. That road can get pretty tough pretty fast. She sat down again in her big chair in the living room. The thunder crashed now
and then with a satisfactory boom and the room flashed with lightning. All these years, she thought, listening and watching, making supper, always busy, always doing.

Women! she thought. We just wander on with our lives, going here, going there, wherever we’re pushed, willy nilly. Busy, busy, busy. One day you look up and it’s over, they’re gone—the husband, the children—and you’re left alone.

With each year that’s passed, Rhea thought, I have grown more and more into myself. I am more solidly myself now than I’ve ever been. She was sinking back into that blackness again, but Selena and Diane hovered in her mind’s eye, would not yet release her. No, she said to them, there’s nothing I can do; you have to do it for yourself, and then she was plunging again through the layers of darkness into that place she went that held both the past and the future.

Diane is already in bed, watching Tony as he takes off his clothes. She is sitting up, her pillows pushed behind her, her hands clasped on the blankets that cover her knees. She likes to watch Tony because he is so beautiful. Well, perhaps his face isn’t quite perfect, his nose a little too big, his chin not quite sculptured enough. But, no, the whole effect is pleasing, really pleasing.

“Gee, you’re a good-looking man!” she says to him as he comes and sits on the bed beside her. He grins at her over his shoulder, half-embarrassed, half-discounting what she says.

You’re not so bad yourself,” he says, and then they both laugh because they’ve both said these things before. He sighs, lifts the blankets and slides under them, pulling them up to his chest, as she lies down beside him.

“Well, here we are,” he says, putting his arms comfortably under his head. Diane puts out the lamp that sits on the floor on her side of the bed. “In the big city at last. Babes in the woods.”

“Speak for yourself,” Diane says smugly. “It feels like home to me.” In the light coming through the window they can see the suitcases still open on the floor by the bed and cardboard boxes stacked up and squeezed into the corner by the small closet. The mirror, which hasn’t been attached to the dresser yet, leans against the wall, reflecting the streetlight.

“God, this room is hardly big enough to turn around in. We’ve got to get things unpacked so we can get those boxes out of here.” She knows Tony is frowning now, but refuses to let this bother her.

“You know finding a job is more important right now. And I’ve got to spend time with the kids too, until they get settled. Unpacking boxes isn’t on the top of my list of things to do.” Tony is silent.

“We’ve been here ten, twelve days,” he says, finally.

“It seems like five minutes,” Diane replies. “Tomorrow I’m taking the kids onto the university campus. Everybody says it’s beautiful this time of year. And I want to see what’s inside those gorgeous stone buildings.”

“Did you set the alarm?” Tony asks, yawning. “I think I should get up about fifteen minutes earlier. Then I won’t have to rush so much. You should see the traffic on the bridge when I hit it just after eight. You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Here,” Diane says, handing him the alarm clock from the floor by the lamp which she has turned on again. “Set it however you want it. Cathy always gets me up.” He takes it, sighing, sits up, and begins to fiddle with it.

“Oh, for the days when the sun got me up,” he says. Diane resists saying anything.

“Have you got any job interviews lined up for tomorrow?” Tony asks. He hands the clock back to her, she puts it on the floor and turns the light out again.

“No, I phoned those places we saw in the paper, but without training and no education beyond high school, they don’t want anything to do with me. So it’s back to knocking on doors. I just try to look hard-working and humble.” Tony has to laugh at this.

“You! Humble!” He can’t stop laughing. He laughs so hard that Diane starts to laugh, too.

“Okay, not humble,” she says, and leans over him, trying to shake him to make him stop laughing. He reaches up suddenly and grabs her with both arms, pulls her hard against him.

“My God, I love you,” he breathes into her ear, and for some reason she feels irritation at this.

So what? she wants to say. She intends to say it as soon as he stops kissing her, but that heat he makes in her is already spreading downward through her legs, all the way to the soles of her feet, and upward through her lungs and heart, into her neck, relaxing the tendons there, her cheeks and forehead are warm with it too, and then she is lost, whatever she wanted to say, whatever she was thinking gone too.

After he is asleep, she lies well over on her side of the bed, staring into the warm summer darkness. The small window is open and through it she can hear the muted, hollow roar of the city. She closes her eyes, listening, not trying to pick out individual sounds, but somehow trying to rise into that humming, to merge with it. Gradually, as she concentrates on it, it begins to creep through her, she feels herself vibrating minutely with it. She can no longer feel the warm, rumpled sheets under her or over her, nor hear Tony’s steady breath beside her. She hears the canopy of sound covering her. She is rising with the sound, she is the sound.

Tires screech on the street nearby, she opens her eyes and she is back in bed again beside Tony, in the hot, stuffy room.

She thinks of that long moment with him when they were once again making love, how good it was, how complete in itself, how necessary to her life.

Necessary to my life? She wonders. She tries to imagine a life without Tony in bed beside her every night, asking her questions, telling her things, making suggestions, reaching for her. She tries to imagine herself alone in the bed, lying in the centre, listening to the roar of the city. She grimaces to herself in the darkness when she realizes that in the room in her imagination there are no unpacked boxes or open suitcases full of rumpled clothing, the sheets are smooth and cool around her.

So I’m lazy, she thinks. I guess I must be. Lazy and vain, and what else? Selfish. Don’t forget selfish. Dragging Tony and the kids here when they didn’t really want to come.

Now she is swept by that same, nameless longing, so powerful that it is near to pain, that reaches into the roots of her being and spreads through her as inexorably and as powerfully as her desire for Tony did earlier, or ever has, only this is worse, far worse; it spreads itself outward from her soul, it is a need, a compulsion to know, to be a part of the larger life of the universe, to understand it. It has her entirely in its grip. She knows that somehow it is not only her private pain, that it is something ancient and something that is much bigger than herself. It is something primeval; it has something to do with womanhood, and she is nothing more than a pebble on a beach swept by a cosmic wave. She feels as if she can’t even breathe. She feels herself being pulled …

She pulls herself back with great effort, forcing her eyes open, rubbing the sheets with her palms to assure herself that she is real, that she hasn’t gone anywhere.

I’ve made them suffer. I know it, I know I’m responsible for their suffering, and I’m afraid, oh God, I’m terrified that it has only begun.

But still she knows, growing calmer again, even a little sleepy, that she will not stop doing what she is doing, that she will not, no, never, turn back, that she is in the grip of something that is far stronger than any of the things she has been taught to be, and that it has forced her into actions she doesn’t fully comprehend or entirely approve of, but that she must go with, or die.