“Well,” Creath said, “we know what the upshot of that was, don’t we?”
“Creath,” Liza said quickly, “will you give us the blessing?”
Creath muttered a may-God-be-thanked and was reaching for the boiled peas when the Buracks’ other roomer came down the stairs.
She had been silent on the carpeted steps and Travis was startled at the shadow. He had forgotten about the attic room. He stood up from the table, a gesture his mother had taught him was polite when a woman enters.
There was a brief, tense silence.
“Travis Fisher,” Liza said distantly, “this is Anna Blaise.”
He stared at her a long moment before he remembered to take her hand. “Meet you,” he said clumsily, and she made a movement like a curtsy.
He knew he was being impolite, but she was shockingly beautiful. She was young, Travis thought, maybe his own age, but the longer he looked at her the less certain he was. She was radiant and smooth-skinned but her eyes contained depths he did not associate with youth. Her face was round. Her hair was blond and rough-cut and tied back behind her with an alluring carelessness. She gazed at the floor as if uncertain what she ought to do or say; but beneath this shyness there was an inference of great poise, an economy of motion. Travis felt clumsy next to her.
“Why don’t we all sit down,” Liza said flatly.
“Yes,” Anna said, and her voice was a match for the rest of her, calm and modulated, like the playing of a distant flute. She sat down opposite Liza Burack and made the table a symmetry.
For a time, no one spoke. The rattle of their cutlery was loud in the silence.
Covertly Travis watched the girl eat. She kept her eyes downcast, took small portions, used her knife and fork daintily. It occurred to him to marvel that the Buracks had taken in another boarder. He remembered his aunt and uncle being intensely private people. Family people. Times were bad, he thought; they must need the money. But where had she come from?
“I’m from Oklahoma,” he ventured to say. “Near Beaumont.”
Her eyes were on him very briefly. “Yes,” she said. “The Buracks told me you were coming.”
“You from around here?” “Not too far,” she said. “Working in town?”
“I work here,” she said. “In the house. I do sewing. I—”
“For Christ’s sake,” Creath said, “leave her alone.”
Travis was mortified. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Anna Blaise smiled and shrugged.
Something wrong here, Travis thought. Odd and wrong. But he went about his eating.
“Didn’t make but a dent in that pot roast,” Liza said with a sigh when they were finished. She rose, moaning a little, and picked up the big china platter. Anna stood up unbidden and took her own plate, Travis’s, Creath’s.
There was the sound of clattering in the kitchen, a gush of running water.
Creath withdrew a big Virginia cigar and made a ceremony of lighting it. He looked at Travis for a time over the glowing tip.
“Don’t think I don’t know what’s happening,” the older man said.
“Sir?”
“Keep your voice down.” He sighed out a plume of smoke. “You think I don’t know. But I do. The heat, the summer—and you look at her—you have feelings. But there will be none of that in this house. Don’t answer me! This is not a conversation. This is the rules. She is way out of your class, Travis Fisher.”
Travis groped for an answer, astonished. But before he could speak Liza had come back from the kitchen with syrupy wedges of blackberry pie laid out on china plates.
“My!” Creath said expansively. “This is a treat.”
It was round about midnight when Nancy Wilcox walked past the Burack house on DeVille.
She was coming from the open field where the railway trestle crossed the Fresnel River, where Greg Morrow had left her when she refused to let him put his hand up her skirt.
Greg was a pretty rough character, oldest son of a granary worker. He owned a decade-old Tin Lizzie with a blown cylinder in which he squired around whichever female he could talk into a ride. He chewed tobacco and he used what the Baptist Women called “gutter language.” Precisely the kind of date her mother would disapprove of… which was maybe why Nancy had agreed to go with him in the first place. His crudity was kind of fascinating.
Ultimately, however, Greg was not the person Nancy wanted to do it with. If she had had any doubts, the events at the trestle had settled them. She was not a prude; she had read about free love in a book by H. G. Wells before her mother caught her with it (and had the small volume deleted from the town library); she had even done it a couple of times before, with a boy named Marcus whose family had since moved west.
But not with Greg. Greg seemed to think it was owed him, something that was his by right, and Nancy did not feel obliged to encourage him in this delusion. So he had kicked her out of the Lizzie down by the trestle, which made her a little nervous because lately there had been hoboes gathering there; she had seen their fires flickering in the angular darkness under the railway bridge. But she just walked steady and kept her head about her and pretty soon she was back among the streetlights and the box elders. She would catch righteous hell for getting home so late, of course. But in a way she was glad. She liked this time of night, liked to listen to the town ticking and cooling after a blast-furnace July day like this one had been. The midnight breeze on her face was soothing; the trees chattered to themselves in what she liked to imagine was a secret language.
She gazed up at the gray outline of the Burack house against the stars.
In the darkness it appeared to be just what that Mrs. Burack obviously imagined it was: a sturdy keystone in Haute Montagne’s social structure. You couldn’t see the peeling paint, the rain gutters clotted with mulch. Nancy smiled to herself, thinking of what her mother always said about the Buracks: something odd there, something definitely odd, and that girl in the attic!—about as talkative as a deaf-mute, and a lot less wholesome.
Nancy peered up at the attic room and saw a faint light flicker there, like fox fire behind the sun-yellowed blinds.
“Strange,” she said to herself…
And there was that Fisher boy, now, too, the one who had stopped by the diner this afternoon. There had been rumblings about his situation, a fatherless family, mother a runabout, hints of some darker truth. But that could have been just the Baptist Women’s rumor mill at work, Nancy thought, grinding a very modest kernel of truth. He had seemed nice. If distracted. He had left his magazine at the diner. Nancy had gazed a long time at the cover of it: horses, guns, a range of purple mountains. He is from far away.
She let the night air carry back her hair. She felt like a shadow sometimes, blowing through these night streets. Time carried her on like a cork on a wave—she was already eighteen—and she had lately become desperate with wondering: where was she bound? She sometimes dreamed of mountains (like the mountains on Travis Fisher’s pulp magazine), of cities, of oceans. She shivered, gazing up at the old Burack house.
She wondered what sort of person Travis Fisher was, and what he dreamed about.
In the attic room, the light flared brighter.
Travis lay in bed, exhausted but helplessly awake, an uneasy excitement running in him like a river. He felt the unfamiliar pressure of the mattress under him. He had covered his nakedness with a single sheet, because it was summer and all the heat in the house traveled up to these high narrow rooms and was retained there. The attic, he thought, must be sizzling.