Where We Are Now (14 page)

After Marsh and Marianne had left they sat on the porch and talked while the dark settled in.

Sarah's voice was hesitant when she began. “Her family sounds … I don't know … peculiar. She laughs about them a lot, but I wonder—Sounds to me like they've gone to drink and decline.”

“Maybe we sound the same to them,” he teased. “An old cowboy and his wife who wears her boots in the kitchen
from a family still hanging onto land so drought-bitten nobody can raise anything but rocks.”

“Still…. ”

“It doesn't matter how they sound, Sarah. He's going back up there and he'll marry her. And it doesn't matter she wasn't raised in the country and isn't a Baptist. She's a good rider.”

“Horses!” Sarah accused him. He could almost see her eyes glinting in the dusk. “That's all you think about! That girl doesn't go to church even.”

“Oh well,” Carter said mildly. He wasn't heavy on church himself. Religion took all kinds of shapes. There were plenty that showed up every Sunday that weren't particularly good folks. Sarah would like Marianne well enough given some time.

It took longer than he'd thought. Most women he'd known became friends in their kitchens, but Marianne would hardly come near Sarah's. Of course, like the rest of them, she did walk in the house through the kitchen door … carrying a pie sometimes. She was good with pies, even Sarah admitted. Otherwise she stayed close to Marsh, went out to the stables with him, rode with him, sat in the living room with both of them like she didn't know she should be in the kitchen. It got so he had to get in the kitchen himself, set the table, pour the iced tea. If he didn't Sarah worked up such a head of steam, he feared she'd let it boil out on the girl.

Washing up after they left, Sarah snapped, “She's used to servants, I guess. Well, I won't be hers! Miss Hoity-Toity!”

“Oh, Sarah—”

“Whether they had help or not, she should know it's only common decency—Nevermind!” She reversed herself as she was liable to when she got mad. “I can do them. I'm used to doing dishes.”

“You could ask her—”

“I don't want to.”

Stubbornness starched her back so, it aggravated him. Her shoulders bent, her hands clutching the side of the sink, she looked like a cat about to hiss. He started toward her, came as near as he ever had to shaking her before he caught himself. Ashamed at his anger over such a small thing, he edged away to stack the plates he'd just dried in a clattering heap on the cabinet's shelf.

He didn't understand why she wouldn't let go a little, but what was the use of quarreling with his own wife over kitchen chores. Sarah wasn't altogether uncharitable. She'd forgiven him many a time for snubbing a horse too close. Those first years when they were trying to make a little extra by breaking other people's horses at home, she'd been the one on back of her own gelding with the reins of the horse he was breaking wrapped around her saddle horn. Close, sometimes so close they were leg to leg and he feared breaking hers, but she kept his horse from throwing his head up and bucking. They worked together like they had one mind. She wasn't of the same mind now. She wasn't unkind, not outright, but she continued to be a fault-finder.

After a while Marianne started helping more. She was the one who laid the table. Marsh must have caught on. Probably he told her she needed to do something beside pies. He began putting up the dishes, said he remembered where everything went, so Marianne took over the washing. It was like they had agreed on this between themselves before they drove out to the country.

Then it was clothes. Sarah thought she either dressed up too much or not enough. She came out to the house wearing high heels the first time. Later she took to wearing blue jeans every visit, and that didn't suit Sarah any better.

He argued, “If she goes to the barn with us, she needs to wear britches.'

“She could wear some that don't need mending,” Sarah snapped. Marianne displeased her by being herself. Eventually he saw jealousy was part of it. Sarah hadn't wanted to let go of Marsh. They were late getting him. Maybe she hadn't got through mothering by the time he married. When he faced her with this, she said they had only raised him to let him go like she knew she was supposed to say it. Her hardness wore on him.

As a boy Marsh didn't inherit much of Carl's temper, but when he sensed any sort of unfairness he was quick to talk back. About the time he was fourteen he began to get in fights, generally with bigger boys. Maybe it wasn't all because of bullying; high spirits led to fighting sometimes like it did with young horses. Marsh was light, so he lost a lot. One of his teachers suggested they get him to run track. He was too light for football, running would be good for him. Accustomed to training young horses to a long walk and a fox-trot for men who needed a good traveling horse to ride all day, running for the sport of it seemed a strange notion at first. When Marsh began running he walked beside him on a horse, then at the boy's insistence, let him go alone. Probably it was too discouraging to run against a horse. The world grew again, stretched out to the oval of a racecourse where Marsh ran against other boys, ran against time. Sarah and he went to all the meets, talked to the rest of the parents.

“We should adopt him,” Sarah said.

But hadn't they already? And hadn't he adopted them?

Sarah seemed to agree until he married. Not until the babies were born did she soften up. At first she thought Marianne ought to quit her job and stay home with the children. He told her not to say so. She didn't need to say anything
directly. Instead, she asked Marianne a lot of sharp questions about the woman she'd hired to help, talked about the shortness of childhood, carried on about the girls. They came to visit whenever Marianne would let them. Sarah complained it wasn't often enough. Gradually Kate and Sally did what Marianne couldn't do alone. They played with measuring spoons and old tin bowls and dough till Sarah taught them both how to make biscuits even though Kate was the only one really old enough to learn.

They were messing around with that about the time he retired … too soon. No help for it, and no use to feel sorry for himself either. He wasn't needed. That was all. He kept telling Sarah he wasn't unhappy. Well, maybe he was a little. People quit buying horses for a while; or they weren't interested in the kind he trained, or in the eighties, less of them could afford horses. He kept three of his own, two geldings he loosed to run in the small pasture in front of the house and a stallion he put to stud. The stallion brought him a little company, brought people who liked to talk horses. Easy to stand around a corral or down at the feed store jawing, too easy. He turned to improving his small herd of cattle, to trying different breeds of bulls then began restoring an unused horse trap behind the barn. He planted native grasses mixed with wildflowers—big bluestem, Indian grass, little blue, side oats, and switch grass, combined with Engehlman daisies, Maxmillian sunflowers, bluebonnets, coreopsis, paintbrush, gay feather. Many of the wildflowers like pucoon and purple dalea he'd never heard of before. Blistering his hands harvesting, he resowed, repeating the names to Sarah until she knew them, the same way they had taught the name of heroes and dates of battles to Marsh. Gave him history, he said when he went off to college to study more of it. Carter filled in the hours with other tasks. In wet times he mended water gaps, checked on fence staples, kept after the weeds in his
vegetable garden, and in dry months he shored up the small dam he'd built on the creek, reset fence posts, cleaned out the tank, repaired gates. The country busied him enough. Sarah, when they were younger and poorer, kept chickens, but he wouldn't raise hogs. He'd take up serious fishing before he'd take up hogs.

Every afternoon late he leaned against one of the peeled cedar posts on the front porch and watched his horses running in the pasture. There was never one alone; they stuck together. Two with the stallion was all he could afford, all he could manage without help, without somebody to feed, muck out, groom, exercise. Of course, there was Marsh living in Austin with Marianne and the children, three counting the new baby, the first boy.

“Young daddies don't have as much time as they used to,” Sarah said. “They help out with babies more now.”

How would she know a thing like that? Read the paper, watched. Kept those dark eyes trained on young couples with children at church. Soon after Martin was born, Marsh bought the old Clayton place down the road and said he wanted to go into horse breeding and training. They joked about trying to buy both the places in between so the land would be adjoining. The money it took to run a horse farm was no joking matter though. Carter said he'd do the best he could to help him, but what made Marsh think he could make enough to live on?

“I don't really have to, Uncle Carter. With what we've both inherited and Marianne's job, we can manage …barely.”

They brought all three children along with them while he and Marsh worked on the barn. When Marianne decided to help, she left the little girls with Sarah.

“Won't you let me keep the baby, too?” she begged.

Carter had warned her that Marianne might not leave Martin. He didn't think she was vindictive. She only wanted
to keep the new one close, the way some mares were more protective of their colts than others. Of course, he didn't say so. Long ago Sarah had broken him of comparing women to horses …out loud.

Gradually Marianne began to share the baby. Another boy for Sarah. A way of doing it again. She could talk to Marianne about raising boys. Her world shrank to the size of a bassinet. She was that crazy about the baby. Carter worried a little about Kate and Sally noticing. Instead they acted as if it were normal. And maybe it was. Some women were partial to babies.

Everything seemed normal for a while. Carter, caught by the current of his life, enjoyed an older man's pleasures, found himself considering the right size of horse for Martin's first lessons, the spots he and Marsh would take him fishing, then Martin died all alone in the night in his baby bed for no reason. He didn't like to say it, not even to himself. Crib death. Ugly sounding. Unnatural. That was what happened though. In a rare spell of misery, Carter held onto the iron of reality. Early in November when all the earth had turned dry brown and gray they had a little private funeral at the graveyard, put him next to Carl and Liz, his grandparents who had given up a son to him and Sarah and had never lived to see their grandson. After the service they went home all numb and knowing nothing.

Marianne wouldn't have anything to do with any of them. Did she turn on Marsh, too?

“She won't let me help” Sarah cried.

“I expect she's not feeling too … too….” What was it he wanted to say? “Generous.” Was that it? Or was Marianne numb as he was? Carter didn't think so. Maybe she just seemed to be. Sometimes grief was like being in a bad dream that wouldn't end when you woke up. Was that the way it took Marianne?

Sarah had tried. They had gone to the house, taken food. Sarah took charge of the kitchen, looked after all the flowers people insisted on sending though Marsh and Marianne had asked them not to. Kate and Sally had been sent away to a friend who had children their age. Best for them, Marianne said. They were too young, five and three, to come to a funeral, she and Marsh said. Children that age couldn't understand death.

“They know he's gone. They slept in the same room with him. That's enough for now.”

Who would speak against them? Carter couldn't, nor could Sarah.

Marianne's cousin Fergus was the only one from her family to come down from Tennessee. He wasn't there long, and Sarah vowed he drank the whole time. “All of the Moores do.”

“Hush,” Carter said, knowing she might be quiet, but she'd go on thinking it. Maybe they would have another baby, maybe not. His and Sarah's world became the shape of the small country cemetery and it seemed to be ruled by accident.

Sarah tried to comfort him, to comfort both of them by talking about all the other McNeils. She reeled off the names of the next generation, fourteen of them. The only time he ever saw some of those children was Christmas at Henry's house. He didn't like to say so, but he forgot the names of two or three. Kate and Sally and Martin were his and Sarah's.

Marsh seemed as quiet about the loss of his son as he'd been about losing his parents. Grief was strangely private and public. Some people it diminished; some it made larger. Marsh and Marianne were lean in their grief. Sarah kept on cooking for them as if she might stuff them both so full there wouldn't be any room for hurt. He could tell they weren't eating much. Sorrow already filled them up. They rocked on
that way awhile, he and Sarah alone at the place, Marsh and Marianne staying in town with the girls.

When Marianne called, Sarah couldn't tell him what she said right away. “What is it?” He kept asking.