The Last Letter (20 page)

Jeanie ran her hand over the cool side of the tub. Of course he didn’t because
he
wouldn’t, Jeanie thought. She ignored Frank’s grammar that had begun to lose its luster with the loss of the rest of his prairie manners. He crossed his arms and appeared bored— whistling at the ceiling—to have to attend to his wife in such a way.

“No, no. My James, sweet James is always considering his mother.” Jeanie waved James to her, kissed him on the forehead and snuggled him into her side. He nestled his head on her shoulder, closed his eyes and his face instantly appeared as it had when he was a sleeping toddler.

Frank stomped out of the dugout.

“Well, I told Frank I’d help pull in the first batch of water, so…“ Templeton said.

He hesitated then bowed into his hat, offering Jeanie a wink. Jeanie flushed.

“Wait, don’t go…thank you,” Jeanie held her hand palm up, not knowing how to express her gratitude for something that was a much too personal purchase, but the kindness behind it was evident. Templeton squeezed her hand then left to get the water.

Once the water was rising in the tub and Jeanie was salivating over it, Templeton bid goodbye so Jeanie could finally settle into a cool bath and get cleaner than she’d been in months. She settled into the water, nearly iced with the relative difference in water and air temperatures.

“Oh, that’s good. Very good.” She closed her eyes and lay back in ecstasy.

Katherine pulled the curtain of the necessary aside, holding a wooden bowl. Jeanie sat forward. In the bowl were Jeanie’s love letters from Frank and a glass container.

“Here, Mama. Miss Lutie made this for you, thought you were looking a bit weary in your condition.” Katherine opened the glass container and held it under Jeanie’s nose.

“Almonds,” Jeanie said, a smile pulling across her face.

“It’s night cream. For ladies of a certain age, Miss Lutie said. She really slaved over this concoction. She even gave me the recipe…lanolin, cocoa butter, honey, and her famous rosewater.”

“Ladies of a certain age she said? Well, that Lutie, she’s always thinking isn’t she?” Jeanie was too enamored with the possibility of smelling like a lady again, that she overlooked Lutie’s characterization of her as old.

“What’s wrong, Mama?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing at all. I’m utterly buoyed by our new neighbors, their inclination toward such kindness. I don’t think…“

“Here’s your letters, Mama.”

“Oh, that’s okay, I think this bath alone will soothe my soul enough tonight. Besides, I’ve read those letters so many times I think I could page through them in my mind without much trouble.”

“Sure, Mama. I’m going to sleep. The boys are out like candles in a prairie gale already and I need strength for tomorrow.”

“Well, okay, that’s a good idea. Kiss.”

Katherine draped her arms around Jeanie’s neck and kissed her cheek. Jeanie dripped some water down Katherine’s face. “Can I have the tub when I wake tomorrow?”

“Sure, better hurry though. Mr. Templeton needs it for the plaster.”

“I’ll rise bright and early and for once in a long time, shiny!”

Jeanie laid her head back, closing her eyes. She’d scrubbed her body upon entering the water and was enjoying its coolness, the way the water lifted the weight of her stomach. She was nearly asleep when a hand ran down her belly and between her legs. She shot forward holding her chest. Frank pulled back raising his hand in surrender.

“Sweet Jesus in Heaven if there is one!”

“Jesus is right,”
Frank said. “Why does the hand of your husband shock you?”

Jeanie wanted to tell him the truth, that for once she had a moment to relax and she would not spend her respite on Frank’s base yearnings. For
once,
she needed something for herself.

“After all this work,” Frank said, “old Templeton made for me, fetching your water like an errand boy, I think I should garner some reward.”

Jeanie reclined in the tub and shut her eyes, turning away. “Frank. I’m exhausted. This is my first tub in months. I’m with child if you’ve forgotten.”

She waited for him to whip the curtain aside, stomp away, showing his anger at her rebuff, but all she heard were his repeated sighs. She sighed back at him, refusing to open her eyes, or even turn her face toward him.

He dumped the last of the water into the tub. The water rose and splashed over the side. She kept her eyes closed even though she could very well hear the earthy floor turning to mud.

Leave.Leave.Leave.

She exhaled deeply again trying to find pleasure in her tubbing even if Frank was going to just stand there, watching, pouting.

A sour, male smell rose into Jeanie’s nose. She opened her eyes. Frank was standing there, nude, foot up on the side of the tub. He was bent forward, rooting around his private areas, scratching, shuffling male body parts around like he was at the open-air market in Des Moines searching out the ripest plums and banana available.

“That’s repulsive.” Jeanie drew back against the far side of the tub as far as she could.

“Ah, Jeanie, sweetness, nothing new here.”

She held her nose closed. “It’s the gosh-blamed smell that has me recoiling. Not the mere sight of you ferreting around your body like a primate.”

“What is
that?”
Frank pointed to slight redness under his left testicle.

Jeanie covered her eyes, fighting to relocate her repose, ignoring his question. She breathed through her mouth, listening to him splash water, presumably over his stinky skin. “There’s rose water and lotion and potions and everything to relieve you of that stench over there,” Jeanie said.

“If I go through that sort of operation, I expect some attention in return.”

Jeanie paused. She surely didn’t want her suggestion interpreted as an invitation for affection. “Suit yourself, then.”

More splashing as Frank “washed.”

You’re ruining my tub. Ruining this wonderful moment. Get out, get out, get out.

Jeanie opened her eyes slightly, to see him sniffing his underarms. “See you in a minute,” Frank slapped his stomach and waltzed into the main sleeping area, naked as a newborn. Jeanie waited, hoping for the sound of a child to interrupt a possible interlude, but there was silence.

How could he be so disgusting? How could he be the man she’d chosen? Jeanie pruned in the tub, nearly falling asleep again, hoping Frank was dead-away. When thoughts of Templeton repeatedly appeared in her mind, she finally rose from the water.

Focus on what is, not what never will be.

Jeanie circled her hands over her belly marveling at how much it had grown since she’d seen it nude, in the open like that. She slipped her cleanest nightgown over her head. The cool bath might lead to the first comfortable night’s sleep she’d had since she could recall.

She lay on the edge of the bed as softly as possible, relieved at Frank’s even breathing. She sighed, ready to slumber, then felt Frank push into the back of her. He wrapped her in his arm, pulling her toward him, angling her bottom into his hard body. She hated her reaction to him, but couldn’t get rid of the nausea that accompanied his clumsy affection. Frank ignored her unnatural stiffness, played with the back of her hair at the nape of neck. He blew there then drew his fingers down her back rubbing in small circles then pushing into her again.

Jeanie wanted to hit him away, tell him that she was already asleep, that they had a long day ahead of them, that right then in that instant when he made such advances, a complete disgust toward him rose up inside her as though it’d been there forever. She wanted to say those things, but couldn’t.

In the moments following his first pushings against her nightgown-clad body, his sad attempt to initiate intercourse, her mind whipped through various ways she could politely tell him no. She was his wife. It had been months since they’d had relations. Push, push, kiss on the neck. Jeanie moved away a smidge, poising further on the edge of the bed.

“Darling, Jeanie. Please, I just need something. Something, I won’t take long, I promise. You don’t have to do anything. My soul craves silent, loving sympathy.”

Jeanie clenched her jaw, irritated at him, saddened at the state of her feelings for him. When had this happened? She rolled over and looked into his eyes, looking for the face that used to create such lust in her that there were times all she could think of was their next time alone. The confluence of rosewater and still unclean maleness made her stomach clench.

She thought back over the years when she’d been so taken with lust that she wondered if she’d inherited a male inclination toward the act of intercourse, but there on the prairie, it was as gone as the fire-eaten greens had been. Jeanie wanted the feeling back, but that in-loveness that accompanied the first years of their marriage didn’t apparently send roots deep into the prairie of her heart, roots that would nourish flowers, waiting to send color and fragrance up into the world after the heat of fire had passed. Maybe the act of sex alone could bring it back.

Frank kissed her lips and pulled back. “I love you Jeanie Arthur. The kids are asleep. It’s been so long for us. Please, my soul aches for this kind of communion.”

“This alone will cheer your dull cares?” Jeanie asked.

“Only this, only you.”

Jeanie nodded. That single motion was all Frank needed to move on, to set to working on the planes and hills of Jeanie’s body and when he finally released whatever he’d built up inside him, Jeanie felt a mixed sense of relief herself—that he was done, that she still interested him, that although there was no reawakening for her, it was within the terrain of marriage that dry spells were withstood—that perhaps inside her, the roots were just not ready to bring life back. She was pregnant after all.

And so, as Frank got out of bed to use the outhouse, Jeanie fell asleep, her disagreeable feelings soothed by the act of giving Frank what he needed, knowing it was one thing she could still do well enough.

Jeanie woke to the first day of rebuilding Templeton’s house with a racing heart and contented outlook. She thought that in thrusting forward, fixing what burned out with the fire, they would be layering their expertise on the prairie, adding to their innate heartiness in the same way the root systems of prairie grasses and flowers retained theirs to make use of later, after the worst of it—whatever
it
was at the time—passed by.

Jeanie felt optimistic even though Frank lay fitful, moved slower that day, needing several nudges to draw him from the bed. He pushed back the covers and sat up with his face greening over. His shoulders bent in, as though energy was being sucked right out of him and into the bed.

“You sick?” Jeanie sat beside him, holding his shoulders. No response. She brushed his hair back off his sweaty forehead. “You slept all right? I didn’t even hear you come back to bed.”

“Just tired is all, drained from everything. I’ll be all right. Just give me a minute.” Jeanie felt a tenderness in seeing his weakness and she realized how much she needed him to need her.

“Let me get you tea, something to settle your stomach. I have some—”

“Jeanie, no! Go on, let me be. Can’t a man just be for a minute without being handled and prodded and managed all the God-blam’d day?”

“What’s the matter with you? You were fine last night, you were surely fine then.”

Frank rubbed his head, shaking it back and forth. “Just give me a minute. Can I use the necessary? This is just piss-proud, here.” He pointed to his crotch—his morning hardness. “I need to push the blackness away, the—”

“Stop it right now. I’m feeling at sea with all this easy talk and such. We all have to find our manners again or we’ll just puddle up and sink into the soil. Manners are everything, more than I ever pretended when we actually lived among them. Don’t ever speak to me with such crassness again.” Jeanie stopped but didn’t face him.

“And there’s no time for black and blue moods or anything else that comes with them. We’ll die out here if you don’t light a shuck out of here and do something useful.”

“That’s rich, Jeanie. That’s very dramatic of you. I need some water.”

Jeanie didn’t move, back still to Frank. She felt abused and shocked. They weren’t in Des Moines, they didn’t have the luxury of Frank’s black moods, his rushing to this doctor and that to give him a cure while he nursed on his own self-pity. They could not afford this kind of wallowing.

“Water? Please,” he said to her back.

Thoughts of the night before, the way she let herself be used for his comfort and the way it meant nothing to him, stopped Jeanie from rushing to him, begging him to let her help him, to charm his sorrowful mood away the way only a wife can. She pushed her shoulders down and back and left the dugout without a word or deed toward his needs.