Florence swung around to face the stove so that her husband couldn’t see her cry. Her hand fell on the handle of the frying pan. She wheeled back around, her reddened eyes burning with fury. “I should be like one of those hardened women who live in the shacks in the hills. I should take this iron skillet to your head and be done with your constant carping and cruelty.”
“Just try it,” dared Dewey, frostily. He buttoned his threat with a quick gulp of coffee. “It’s cold,” he pronounced.
Through all this, Joanna had been sitting at the kitchen table, staring down at her own blackened biscuits. She’d been sitting as she always did, silently, painfully, wishing that the hard words would stop. But this morning Joanna would not remain silent. This morning Dewey and Florence Hurd’s adopted daughter did something she had never done before: she made a threat of her own. “If you don’t stop this, I’m going upstairs and cut off all my hair.”
Joanna’s parents stared at her for a moment in awe. Then her mother said, “You will do no such thing.”
“I will,” said Joanna. “Stop it, or I intend to cut off every strand.”
Now it was her father’s turn to speak. “If you cut off even one filament of that beautiful hair of yours, Joanna, you will be swiftly and roundly punished. Do you hear me?”
“She has ears,” said Florence. “She heard you.”
“You can put down the goddamned frying pan now, Florence, unless you intend to use it, and then I’ll return in kind with enormous pleasure.”
The husband and wife glared daggers at one another, while their abashed daughter reverted to her former plate-staring posture. Like a whale unexpectedly breaching the surface of the water and then submerging herself again, Joanna disappeared, dropping down, down, down into the depths of her customary depression.
Dewey Hurd rose from the table, his look now redirected to the window across the room. “Talbot’s pulling in. Come with me, Joanna. I’ll spare you having to sit here and listen to your mother disparage me for the rest of the morning.”
Talbot was a large man in his middle years. As was his sartorial wont, he wore a western hat and overalls over a flannel work shirt. He trimmed sheep the same way his father and grandfather had trimmed them: with hand shears. He was very good at his job — the best in the county. It was impossible not to nick the ewes now and then, but when the job was over, there were very few cuts upon the sheep he’d sheared that were not small and easily healed by the wool grease, which contained a natural antiseptic. Talbot explained this to Joanna as he trimmed. He was fond of the girl, who reminded him of his three daughters, each now grown and moved away.
There had been three wet sheep and Talbot saw no need to return on another day after the fleeces had dried out. Nor would his busy schedule have even allowed it. “The wool can dry just as easily off the sheep as on.”
“How much do you think we’ll get this year, Talbot?” asked Dewey as the professional shearer went about his business.
“I’m guessing these ladies are good for about seven, maybe seven-and-half pounds a coat. That’s around 130 pounds all told. Not bad for the Shropshire-Hampshire cross and not bad at all for one of the smallest herds in the county. When are you going to decide to go all in as a sheep man, Hurd?”
The question being largely rhetorical, Dewey shrugged. He liked keeping milch cows too.
The sheep presently being trimmed was the smallest of the flock. Talbot had set her easily upon her rump on the shearing platform, holding her in place with his left knee and upper arms. Joanna watched, fascinated, as he worked his way down and out from the animal’s right ear, taking the coat off one piece at a time. Talbot was fast, but he was also good at holding the ewe still while keeping large sections of the wool intact.
It took about three hours to get all the sheep sheared, and Talbot took a few extra minutes to help gather the wool pieces and tie them all up, inner side out, into tight balls with paper twine. Joanna assisted with this as well, though her interest lay, as it did each year, in making sure that the waiting lambs were properly reunited with their respective mothers. Stripped of their wool jackets, the ewes all looked alike to the worried, bleating young ones, each of whom had to wait until her mother, through diligent rump-sniffing, claimed her. This day’s reconciliation went smoother than in previous years and made Joanna think of her own birth mother and the fact that she would never have the chance to reunite with her. Instead, she was now fixed by law to a woman who, no doubt, loved her in her own way, and a father who showed affection often enough to keep her from hopping on the next freight train to try her luck elsewhere.
Still, Joanna was far from happy and quite serious about her threat. Had her mother and father not already defied her request by keeping up their hostility toward one another in spite of her warning? Did they not believe her when she said that she would cut off all of her beautiful hair? And yet she didn’t want to be punished. The punishment would come out of anger, she had no doubt, and would be severe.
Joanna watched from the window of the shed as Talbot trudged back to his truck. Her father had gone to take the bundles of dry wool to his own truck behind the barn. It was at this moment that an idea came to her. She tore away from the sheep shed, running as fast as she could to catch up with Talbot before he drove away. She succeeded in reaching him just as he was climbing into the cab.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“There’s something I’d like you to do for me,” she said, slightly breathless.
“Something that you—” He faltered.
Talbot knew that the Hurd household was a troubled one. He had spoken more than once with his equally sympathetic wife about how hard it must be for a child to have to grow up in such a noxious environment. He worried in that moment that the girl might be preparing to ask him if he would take her home with him — let his wife and him be her new parents. He had heard stranger requests.
But this is not what Joanna sought. What she wanted was simply this: “Would you take your shears, please, Mr. Talbot, and cut off all my hair?”
“Cut off—”
“All of my hair.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I can’t do it myself. My parents have forbidden me. But they haven’t said that someone else couldn’t do it.”
“Good God, Joanna. I can’t cut off your hair. Not unless your parents asked me to, and even then, it would be a crazy thing to cut human hair with these things. You take scissors to hair. Have you never been to a beauty parlor?”
Joanna shook her head. “The last time my hair was cut I was just a little girl.” Joanna looked down. It would be difficult for her to say what needed to be said while she looked at him. “Mr. Talbot, they won’t stop. I’ve asked them to stop. I’ve told them what I will do if they don’t. But then they would punish me. They won’t punish me if you do it. They can’t. Cut it very short, please. I want them to know that it’s their hatred of one another that’s made me look this way — like, like Joan of Arc. Like Joanna of Arc!”
“You want to martyr yourself to bring peace to your family.”
Joanna nodded.
There followed a long silence. The silence was broken by the sound of Mr. and Mrs. Hurd’s raised voices inside the farmhouse. Talbot watched what the anger-laced words did to the girl — how they made her flinch and shudder, made her retreat inside herself. He took out his shears.
Over the phone that night, Dewey Hurd said he would have Talbot arrested.
“You arrest me, Hurd, and you’ll have to find another shearer. Nobody in this county does as good a job as I do for the price that I charge. You’d be an ass and a fool to do it.”