Searching for Caleb (15 page)

   "Mama-"

   "Please, I've been counting on it. I know it will work. See, I've written the number so neatly? Take it. Take it."

   She pressed it into her hands. Justine climbed out of bed, still unwilling.

   "Go on, Justine."

   In the hall, the telephone sat on a piecrust table. The window above it was partly open, so that Justine in her flimsy cotton nightgown shivered while she dialed.

   "Hello," Sam Mayhew said.

   She had been expecting her grandmother, a static-voiced old lady she hardly knew. She wasn't prepared for her father yet.

   "Hello," he said.

   "Daddy?"

   There was a pause. Then he said, "Hello, Justine."

   "Daddy, I-today is my wedding day."

   "Yes, I saw it in the paper."

   She was silent. She was taking in his soft, questioning voice, which reminded her of his baffled attempts at conversation long ago in Philadelphia. For the first time she realized that he had actually left.

   Everything had broken and altered and would not ever be the same.

   "Honey," he said. "You can always change your mind."

   "No, Daddy, I don't want to change my mind."

   "I'm about to buy a house in Guilford. Wouldn't you like that? There's a room for you with blue wallpaper. I know you like blue. You could go away to college, someplace good. Why, you used to be a high-B student! Those Pecks think girls go to college to mark time but-it's not too late. You know that. You can still call it off."

   "Daddy, will you come give me away at the wedding?"

   "No. I can't lend myself to such a thing."

   "I'd really like you to."

   "I'm sorry."

   Her mother tugged at Justine's nightgown. "Tell about the happiest day of your life!" she hissed.

   "Wait-"

   "Who's that?" her father asked.

   "It's Mama."

   "What's she doing there?" ' "She says to tell you-"

   "Did your mother put you up to this?"

   "No, I-she just-"

   "Oh," her father said. "I thought it was you that was asking. I wish it had been."

   "I am asking."

   "Justine, I'm not going to come to your wedding. Don't bring it up again.

   But listen, because these are the last sensible words you'll hear all day, or maybe all the rest of your life: you've got to get out of there."

   "Out, Daddy . . ."

   "You think you are getting out, don't you. You're going to farm chickens or something."

   "Goats."

   "But you're not really leaving at all, and anyway you'll be back within a year."

   "But we're going to-"

   "I know why you're marrying Duncan. You think I don't. But have you ever asked yourself why Duncan is marrying you? Why is he marrying his first cousin?"

   "Because we-"

   "It's one of two reasons. Either he wants a Peck along to torment, or to lean on. Either he's going to give you hell or else he's knotted tighter to his family than he thinks he is. But whichever, Justine. Whichever.

   It's not a business you'd care to get involved in."

   "I can't talk any more," Justine said.

   "What? Hold on there, now-"

   But she hung up. Her teeth were chattering. "What happened?" her mother asked. "What happened, isn't he coming?"

   "No."

   "Oh! I see. Well."

   "I feel sick."

   "That's wedding jitters, it's perfectly natural," her mother said. "Oh, I never should have asked you to call in the first place. It was only for his sake."

   Then she led Justine back to her room, and covered her with the quilt handstitched by Great-Grandma, and sat with her a while. The quilt gave off a deep, solid warmth. There was a smell of coffee and cinnamon toast floating up from the kitchen, and a soft hymn of Sulie's with a wandering tune. Justine's jaw muscles loosened and she felt herself easing and thawing.

   "We're going to do without him just fine," her mother said. "I only wanted to make him think he was a part of things."

   Later the minister, Reverend Didicott, told the assistant minister that the Peck-Mayhew wedding was the darnedest business he had ever seen.

   First of all the way they sat the guests, who were not numerous to begin with: friends clumped in back, and the bride's and groom's joint family up front. There was something dreamlike in the fact that almost everyone in the front section had the same fair, rather expressionless face-over and over again, exactly the same face, distinguished only a little by age or sex. Then the groom, who seemed unsuitably light of heart, followed him around before the ceremony insisting that Christianity was a dying religion. ("It's the only case I know of where mental sins count too; it'll never sell," he said. "Take it from me, get out while the getting's good." Right then Reverend Didicott should have refused to marry them, but he couldn't do that to Lucy Hodges Peck, whose family he had known down South.) The bride was given away by her grandfather, an unsmiling man with a mighty snappy way of speaking to people, although so far as was known the bride's father was in excellent health. The groom refused to kiss the bride in public. But the bride's mother was the strangest.

   Perfectly sedate all through the ceremony, if a little trembly of mouth, gay and flirtatious at the reception afterwards, she chose to fall apart at the going away. Just as the groom was enclosing the bride in his car (which was another whole story, a disgraceful greenish object with a stunted rear end), the mother let out with a scream. "No!" she screamed. "No! How can you just leave me all alone? It's your fault your father's gone! How can you drive off like this without a heart?" The bride started to get out but the groom laid a hand on her arm and stopped her, and then they took off in their automobile, which appeared to be led by its nose. The mother threw herself in the grandfather's arms and wept out loud. "We people don't cry, Caroline," he said. The most ancient Mrs. Peck of all put on a genteel smile and started humming, and Reverend Didicott looked inside the envelope the groom had given him and found fifty dollars in Confederate money.

   Duncan told everyone they would be away on a honeymoon, but they weren't; he just liked to lie. Instead they went straight to the farm. For two weeks they were left to themselves. Duncan worked uninterrupted, settling in eight Toggenburg does and a purebred buck who smelled like a circus, transporting bales of hay and sacks of Purina goat chow, a block of pink salt and a vat of blackstrap molasses he claimed would increase milk production when added to the goats' drinking water. The weather had turned suddenly warm and he went about in his undershirt, whistling "The Wabash Cannonball," while inside their little house Justine threw open all the windows and tied the damask curtains back so they wouldn't hinder the breeze. She had made the place a replica of Great-Grandma's house, if you ignored the green paper walls and the yellowed ceilings. Rugs covered the flowered linoleum, and the four-poster bed hid the fungus growing beneath one window. She fought the foreign smells of kerosene and fatback by hanging Great-Grandma's china pomander ball in the hall. She worked for hours every day constructing meals from Fannie Farmer's cookbook, the one her aunts all used. In the evenings, the two of them sat side by side on the front porch in cane-seated rockers that used to be their grandfather's. They looked out across their scrubby, scraggly land, past the slant-roofed shed where the does stood swaybacked. Like an old country couple they rocked and watched the gravel road, where they might see an occasional pick-up truck bound for the Jordans' farm on the hill or a string of children carrying switches and weedy flowers, dawdling home. Justine thought she would like to stay this way forever: isolated, motionless, barely breathing, cut loose from everyone else. They were like people under glass. They rocked in unison side by side, almost touching but not quite, as if thin wires were stretched between them.

   Then the letters started coming. "I keep busy, I go for a lot of walks," her mother said. "Not far, of course. Just up and down your great-grandma's side yard, up and down again." Aunt Lucy said, "We think of you often. Especially Caroline does, you can tell although you know she wouldn't mention it for anything." "Last Sunday," GreatGrandma said, "we laid two places for you supposing you might be back from your honeymoon and would think to come for dinner, as it would do Caroline a world of good, but it seems you couldn't make it."

   Justine felt stabbed in the chest. "Dear Mama," she wrote, "I miss you very much. I want to come home for a visit. Duncan says we will just as soon as we can, although of course goats are not something you can just walk off and leave. They have to be milked twice a day and watered, and Duncan has to stay pretty close by anyway because he has put an ad in the paper and soon customers will be coming ..."

   "Dear Ma," Duncan said on a postcard. "High! We're doing fine. Say hello to everybody. Sincerely, Duncan."

   The family's ink was black, their envelopes cream. Nearly every morning a cream-colored accordion lay waiting in the mailbox at the end of the driveway. Once Duncan got there before Justine and he scooped the letters out of the box and flung them over his head. "Hoo!" he said, and tipped back his face like a child in a snowstorm while the envelopes tumbled all around him. Justine came running, and bent at the edge of the gravel to gather them up. "Oh, Duncan, I wish you wouldn't do things like this," she told him. "How will I know I've got them all?"

   "What does it matter? Each one is just like the next."

   It was true. Still she read them closely, often stirring or starting to speak, while Duncan watched her face. Each envelope let out a little gust of Ivory soap, the smell of home. She could imagine the leafy shadows endlessly rearranging themselves outside her bedroom window, and her grandfather's slow, fond smile when he met her at the start of a day. She missed her grandfather very much.

   "If you like," Duncan said, "I'll take you this Sunday for dinner. Is that what you want?"

   "Yes, it is," she told him.

   But somehow they didn't go. Duncan became involved in cleaning the barn, or wiring the new electric fence. Or they simply overslept, waking too slowly with their legs tangled together and their blue eyes opening simultaneously to stare at each other across the pillow, and then the unmilked goats were bleating and there were always so many chores to do.

   "Maybe next Sunday," Justine would write. When the new sheaf of envelopes arrived she felt chastened and sorry even before she had opened them. But when she took the letters to Duncan out in the barn he only laughed. Like a teacher with a pointer, he would poke a stalk of timothy at stray sentences here and there-reproaches, transparent braveries, phrases with double and triple and quadruple meanings. " 'Of course we're sorry you didn't make it but we understand perfectly, as I had already told your aunts that perhaps we shouldn't expect you.' Ha!" he said.

   Justine's face, then, would slowly ease, but she reclaimed the letters and stacked them carefully before she went back to the house.

   Then one day a truck rattled up their driveway and a man climbed out, carrying a telephone on the palm of his hand. "Phone," he said, as if Justine should lift the receiver to answer it. But he swung on by her and up the porch steps, with a beltful of tools clanking around his hips.

   Duncan met him in the doorway. "We didn't order that," he said.

   "Somebody did."

   "Not us."

   The man pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and shook it open.

   "Peck and Sons," he said.

   "That's someone else."

   "Your name Duncan Peck?"

   "Yes."

   "This phone is for you, then. Don't complain. Bill goes to Peck and Sons.

   Wished I got presents like that."

   "If we had wanted a telephone we would have ordered it on our own,"

   Duncan said.

   But Justine said, "Oh, Duncan, it's a gift! We can't hurt their feelings."

   Duncan studied her a minute. Then he said, "All right."

   Now the phone rang once, twice, three times a day even, and Justine would come running in from the fields or the barn to answer it. "Justine," her mother said, "I'm upstairs. I'm standing in the hall here looking into your room and your shelf of dolls along the wall, the Spanish lady with her real lace mantilla that your grandfather gave you in Philadelphia when you were only four, remember? She has the sweetest, saddest face."

   "Mama, I'm helping Duncan dehorn a goat."

   "Do you remember when Grandfather gave you the Spanish lady? You insisted on taking her to bed with you, though she wasn't a cuddly kind of doll.

   Your daddy and I came into your room every night after you were asleep and put her up on the bureau again. Oh, you looked so innocent and peaceful! We would stand there a while just watching you. Your daddy didn't have to travel so often then and it seemed we had so much more time together."

   "Oh, Mama," Justine would say, "I wish I could be there with you. Don't take on so, please don't cry."

   Aunt Sarah called, with Aunt Laura May on the upstairs extension. "She's started staying in bed, Justine, she never gets out of her bathrobe. She has these awful headaches. I called your daddy but I believe that man is possessed. He said he wouldn't come, she should come stay in his house and of course that is just not possible, he only has a weekly cleaning lady. Of course she would need more than that, it's all we can do to see to her wants even with Sulie helping out. We're running our feet off."

   "We bring all her meals on a tray," Aunt Laura May said.

   "We've moved the television up to her bedroom."

   "The radio for daytime. Stella Dallas."

   Justine said, "We'll come on Sunday."

   "Do my ears deceive me?"

   "We'll be there around noon," said Justine. "But we can't stay the night, you know, the goats are-"

   "The goats, yes."

   "Goodbye till then."

   She went back out to the field. "Duncan," she said, "I think we'd better go for dinner this Sunday."