“Lovely as always.”
She is so hard, Liza thought sadly. Hard as granite. At one time, of course, they had been friends— allies, at least; wary, but with the same goals before them. In those days (it would have been three years ago: she remembered the annual picnic, “Summer 1929” printed on the invitation cards) Liza had been the leading light of the Baptist Women. It was Liza who had organized the letter campaign to the public school board concerning their thoughtless promotion of the Darwin Theory in the high-school textbooks; it was Liza who had chaired the Temperance Committee. Everyone agreed that without Liza Burack the Baptist Women would have been a vastly less effectual organization.
But then things had begun to happen. Things over which she had no control. That Blaise girl had moved in. Creath began to act strangely. Mary-Jane had come down sick off in Oklahoma, and there was no way Liza could visit, not merely on account of the distance but because of the sort of woman Mary-Jane had allowed herself to become.
The upshot of it all was: Liza faded. She had heard other people use that expression. Faded. It was an odd word. It made her think of flowers left too long in a vase. She thought with some astonishment: I have faded.
And of course Faye Wilcox had stepped into the vacuum Liza had left; and now it was Faye who organized the letter campaigns, the library boycotts; now it was Faye everyone looked to for guidance.
But Faye had her own Achilles’ heel, Liza thought, suppressing a certain vindictive pleasure. She had that daughter of hers, who was quite notorious. Faye herself complained sometimes, though she was shrewd enough to blame it on the schools…
And now, Liza thought, Nancy Wilcox and Travis Fisher were going together.
“I suppose,” Liza said, “you’ve heard about Nancy and my sister’s boy?”
Faye adopted a stern equanimity. Her eyes were steely, buried in small effusions of flesh. “I know they’ve been seen together.”
“My goodness, hasn’t Nancy talked it over with you?”
“Nancy is not inclined to do that.” “Faye, that girl doesn’t appreciate what you do for her.”
Faye relaxed a little. “Indeed she does not. I’m sometimes grateful Martin isn’t alive to hear the back talk she gives me. It would break his heart.”
“You deserve better.”
“It’s in the Lord’s hands,” Faye Wilcox said primly. “And Travis? Have you had any trouble—?”
“Creath says he is unhappy at work. But no real trouble, no, thank God.”
“The times …” Faye Wilcox said.
“Oh, yes.”
“Of course, the boy’s mother …”
“Tragic.” Liza added, “I mean, her death.”
“One wonders if tendencies are inherited.”
“He is a hard worker, in spite of what Creath says. He seems quite stable here. The influence of the home counts for so much, don’t you think?”
Faye nodded grudgingly and brushed the air above her butter tarts. Flies buzzed.
“Still, it could be worse,” Liza said. “The two of them.”
Faye Wilcox gazed across the lawn, the baking asphalt street, her eyes unfocused.
“It could be,” she admitted.
There, Liza thought. It had been decided. In that strained admission, a truce. Nancy and Travis would be allowed to continue seeing each other.
It was, for both Liza and Faye, the best of the meager alternatives. Faye had accepted it… grudgingly, no doubt, for it returned to Liza a measure of control.
Now, Liza thought, now what does this mean? What does this portend for the future?
“Those tarts just look so good,” Liza said.
Faye held one out to her by the paper wrapper, an offering. “Please.”
“Thank you,” Liza said, biting deeply into the pastry.
The ripe sweetness of it exploded in her mouth.
Trav and Nancy made Friday night a regular thing. Twice, as the month crawled toward September, he met her on Saturday as well. When there was nothing at the Fox or the Rialto they walked up The Spur toward the railway depot or out to the wide, grassy fields where the Fresnel ran beyond the town. Nancy knew where the wild strawberry patches were, though the dry season had yielded very few berries. And, slowly, Travis had come to know Nancy.
He liked her. He harbored an admiration for her frankness, her outrageous willingness to defy convention. She had quite consciously put herself in a position Travis had long occupied against his wilclass="underline" outsider, loner—“misfit” was the word she liked to use. And that fascinated him. But it disturbed him, too, the lightheartedness of it, as if she were playing a game with something really quite dangerous, something she did not altogether understand… compromising her femininity with this reckless curiosity. He liked her, but in a strange way he was also afraid of her.
They had come to the strawberry fields again. The sun was going down now, the day’s heat beginning to abate, darkness rising from the eastern horizon beyond the ruin of a shack where, Nancy said, an eccentric railway switchman had once lived. The town was not far away—the train depot was hardly more than a quarter mile distant, obscured by a stand of trees—but their isolation seemed complete. They found a few berries and then Nancy put out a blanket over a bare patch of ground by the tumbledown hut, and they sat there watching the river run with their backs against the sun-warmed wood. A breeze had come up… the twilight breeze, Nancy called it.
She held his hand, and her skin was warm and dry.
She said after a time, “You like that place? The Burack place?”
Travis shrugged. “It’s all right.”
“You don’t sound too enthusiastic.”
“I don’t have much choice. It’s a place to live.”
“You make money down at the plant?”
“Some.”
She smiled knowingly. “I bet that Creath Burack siphons off most of it for rent. Am I right?”
“He takes a share. I save a little.” She was leading up to something, Travis thought.
“How about that girl upstairs?”
“Anna?” He shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t see much of her.”
“She’s a big mystery, you know. Everybody talked about her for a while. Still do sometimes.”
“Really? She’s so quiet—”
“Travis, that’s a major crime in itself. But there’s more to it. There must be. Sure, she’s quiet. Nobody knows where she comes from or how she happened to end up in Haute Montagne. One day she was living at the Buracks’, that’s all anybody knows. But there are rumors. Man named Grant Bevis, used to live next door to your aunt and uncle, married man—he left town real quick not too long after Anna Blaise moved in. Anna takes in sewing but she never shows her face in town. Answers the door sometimes… probably gets all her work that way: people take her sewing just so they can get a glance at her.” Nancy gazed up at a solitary cloud. “They say she’s beautiful.”
“Haven’t you seen her?”
“Maybe I have. Maybe I haven’t. Do you think she’s beautiful?”
“Yes,” Travis said. “You talk to her much?”
“She comes down to dinner. Creath does most of the talking.” He stretched out on the blanket. “I went up one time and offered to help her with the sewing. She said no, she was fine.”
In fact he had stayed a little longer, trying to make small talk. Anna Blaise had sat on the bed, smiling encouragingly but answering in monosyllables. In a modest blouse and skirt she had looked more than attractive, she had been almost devastatingly beautiful, lithe and pale and still, like a piece of china statuary… and Travis had made himself leave the room because if he did not he would have been beside her on the bed, kissing her. He felt sure she would not have objected. He could have done anything he wanted. She did not, after all, object to Creath’s attentions.